The idea that public records — including police misconduct records — belong to the public won a monumental round Thursday. Now it is time to cement that concept into state law.

On Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that misconduct records of Chicago police must remain available to the public after five years, though the contract with the union representing most police officers requires the records to be destroyed at that point.

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“This is a truly momentous decision,” University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman, who wrote a brief in the case, told us on Thursday. “The very information that is needed to identify officers’ patterns and practices would have gone up in smoke forever.”

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