CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) – An Illinois cop has been fired for shirking his duties after a state appeals court ruled an arbitrator's punishment was too mild.
The Dec. 24 decision of the First Appellate District overturned the arbitrator’s ruling, which was affirmed by the Cook County Circuit Court, that Derrick Charles be reinstated as an officer in Country Club Hills with only a written warning.
That punishment was much too light for someone who allowed a detainee to escape in 2017 and months later blew off his assignment to patrol a “notoriously rowdy” night club at closing time, the appeals court found.
Termination is more appropriate, and further intervention by an arbitrator is not needed, the majority ruled.
“Dishonesty by a police officer is detrimental to the service because, among other things, it undermines the officer’s credibility when testifying in criminal cases and creates liability for the municipality in civil cases,” Justice Mathias Delort wrote.
“(W)e find that the only remedy consistent with public policy for Charles’ misconduct is termination.”
In June 2017, Charles arrested Bernard Barfield for criminal trespass but Barfield escaped from a booking room through an open door. Charles was found to have brought his firearm into the room, where there is a no-firearms policy.
Charles tased Barfield after Barfield escaped the building. A sergeant was injured and required treatment.
Charles had forgotten to lock one of the doors through which Barfield fled, a fact he omitted from his report on the incident.
Two months later, Charles was assigned to patrol the closing of a nightclub on a Thursday Ladies’ Night, a routine task for officers in the city. But Charles never showed, and an investigation of the GPS tracker on his squad car showed he sat in the parking lot of an abandoned nursing home a mile away from the club instead.
His car was off, too, preventing him from hearing certain radio dispatches. He said he didn’t remember what he was doing in the parking lot. Despite this, his union successfully convinced an arbitrator that a written warning was the appropriate punishment.
Though the majority ordered his firing instead, dissenting justice Joy Cunningham believed the ruling replaces the arbitrator’s with the appellate court’s own judgment.
“(T)he arbitrator’s decision did not run afoul of public policy simply because he levied a sanction which was less than termination,” she wrote.
“It was a sanction, which in the arbitrator’s judgment, was appropriate for the offense. To find otherwise would be to conclude that termination is the only sanction that is allowable or possible under the facts of this case.