Who wins when it’s “the law” that is fighting “the law?” Probably not us!

It seems to be the trend we’re going through these days in the Chicago area. Our police officers are contemplating legal action for instances where they think they didn’t get the respect they think they deserve.

We have a police officer in suburban Lynwood who, for a few days, faced criminal charges for a pair of shootings along the Illinois/Indiana border that has left one dead. He has his own police chief saying publicly that prosecutors ought to be sued for their professional conduct.

WHETHER OR NOT Brian Dorian ever gets around to filing a lawsuit against Will County government (whose state’s attorney’s office sought criminal charges and whose sheriff incarcerated him for a weekend) remains to be seen.

I’m sure many people will be sympathetic, although I still fear it will shift too much attention to Dorian’s plight, and away from the criminal investigation that is trying to find a suspect in the shootings that took place earlier this month near Beecher, Ill., and Lowell, Ind. – leaving a Hammond, Ind., man dead and others wounded.

Then, there is the completely different case of two Chicago police officers who have gone ahead and filed lawsuits in Cook County Circuit Court against their own police chief. These officers claim their professional reputations are ruined, even though they were never publicly identified UNTIL they took legal action against their own employer.

Which makes me less than sympathetic to their plight. Because for all the legal hassle that gets created to maintain secrecy any time a police officer is suspected of having done something professionally improper, these two cops seem to think it wasn’t enough.

AT STAKE IS an incident on Oct. 11 (a.k.a., Columbus Day) in which a suspect in police custody was beaten, even though that person was already restrained with handcuffs. The suspect claims it was the police who beat him, and several officers have been removed from street duty while the incident continues to be investigated.

As it turns out, two of the officers who were suspected initially were later cleared. It seems the global positioning device in their squad car showed definitively that they were nowhere near the scene where the beating took place.

Those officers have been cleared, they have been restored to street duty, and it would seem like they could get on with their lives – at a time when other officers still remain suspect.

Yet in a moment that shows why some people in our society are mistrustful of law enforcement personnel, these officers seem to be upset that anyone could ever think they could do something wrong.

SO, THEY WENT with the lawsuit, challenging the way in which Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis handled the incident. Of course, the way Weis handled the incident was meant to create the public impression that the department was taking seriously a complaint that police officers would physically abuse an individual.

Because Weis never publicly identified who the officers were, although the officers cite a press conference Weis held Oct. 18 in which he was critical, saying at one point, “to keep them on the streets would put them at risk and put the department at risk.”

It sounds like a totally logical (and innocuous) statement to me.

But these officers are upset that at one point, they were seen by reporter-types outside the Police Department headquarters on 35^th Street when they had to appear before the Internal Affairs division that is investigating the matter. Although I wonder how many saw them merely as faceless police, rather than coming up with a specific identity?

AS THEIR ATTORNEY, Daniel Q. Herbert, told the Chicago Tribune, “statements were made about these individuals, they were published, and my clients suffered damages as a result.”

So by being open and admitting that the police were trying to investigate their own, so to speak, by looking into a potential problem, there are some people who would see that as the problem.

Now I don't know how seriously the courts will take these lawsuits.

It could be that a judge will be inclined to dismiss them (although a part of me sarcastically wonders if the officers in question would consider THAT act to be disrespectful). Or, we could wind up having a judge who will feel the need to seriously ponder the issue – which would involve determining how much “compensation” a cop deserves after being cleared of a charge.

THEIR LAWSUIT SEEKS at least $50,000, but that is the legal minimum. Which basically means it would be up to the judge to figure out what amount of compensation is fair and just.

If anything, I found one other part of Herbert’s rhetoric most interesting – the fact that the officers want some sort of public statement from Weis apologizing to them for their “ordeal.”

Which means this lawsuit is likely less about the financial compensation the cops might someday get (which would be minimal after attorneys take their share and court costs are subtracted) and about coming up with yet another way for the rank-and-file of the Chicago Police to ding away at the professional reputation of their chief (who was never a Chicago cop himself, but was once the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Chicago).

A lawsuit that claims professional embarrassment seems to be more about creating professional embarrassment for someone else than it is providing any sense of compensation. That truly is sad.

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Focus on crime, not on cop

It caught a lot of people off-guard. A police officer, even a suburban type, facing criminal charges for a series of shootings (with one person killed) along the Illinois/Indiana border.



The suspect may look sort of like this

What wound up surprising even more people was when, after spending a weekend in a county jail with a $2.5 million bond that put him in the same category as the most violent of criminals, prosecutors were forced to admit that their evidence wasn’t quite so solid.

THAT IS WHAT caused bond for Brian Dorian to be reduced to personal recognizance (meaning he is trusted to show up in court), and why on Wednesday the charges were dismissed.

Dorian, who has been a police officer in suburban Lynwood and Lansing but has been on leave in recent months due to a shoulder injury, is now a free man. His family and friends are all worked up into a frenzy about how he was singled out for abuse that no law enforcement officer should ever have to endure.

Municipal officials in those towns were eager to believe that a mistake was made – even before the Illinois Victim Notification System made its formal announcement Tuesday night that the case against Dorian was too flawed to continue with.

Go looking around the Internet, and it becomes easy to find comments from people (mostly anonymous) who view this whole situation as one where “liberal freaks” were too eager to pin the blame for these crimes on a white guy as part of some agenda to undermine society as we know it.

NO, THIS DOES not make any sense. But then again, neither does 99 percent of anonymous Internet commentary.

Actually, the Internet factors into the Dorian case. Because the reason given by prosecutors for dropping the whole case was that Dorian’s alibi “checked out.” His alibi was that he was using his computer to check out the Internet.

He claims he was doing exactly what many of you are doing right now. Which means that investigators in Will County eventually checked that computer, and found that he really was on the computer at the time that one of the shootings took place.

Since prosecutors are convinced that all the shootings in this particular burst of incidents occurring down where the Chicago area meets Indiana were committed by the same man with a Colt revolver (a weapon they have yet to recover), it means they have to clear Dorian of everything.

WE’RE NOW GETTING a lot of sarcastic barbs about stupid cops who don’t even know how to check out an alibi before seeking criminal charges. Barney Fife does Joliet (as opposed to Lake County, Ind., where officials never sought charges against Dorian for incidents occurring there, and where sheriff’s police now say they never thought Dorian did it).

The end result is that Dorian – whose family these days tosses out hints of some sort of federal lawsuit seeking compensation for having to spend the weekend in jail as a suspected criminal – probably is going to go through the rest of his life thinking of himself as the victim.

I will be honest. That bothers me.

It’s not that I think Dorian deserves to be persecuted (although if he ever works as an active police officer again, I would hope he retains some sense of what it is like to suddenly be confronted by armed officers threatening to take away his freedom).

IT’S JUST THAT in thinking about these shootings, I really don’t want this to become the story of a police officer falsely accused of a crime – which is what it has all the potential in the world to become.

I want an arrest of some type to provide a sense that police actually have put a halt to the person who thinks they can go bopping back and forth across State Line Road; shooting people who happen to arouse his anger.

The big reason that Dorian was arrested was that one of the people who was shot (but managed to survive) in these incidents picked a picture of the officer out of a photographic lineup, then out of a physical lineup, although the legal "experts" who are merely talking heads whenever broadcast news needs someone to speak are now saying that the physical lineup was tainted by the prior picture lineup.

Now, that person likely has his testimony tainted to the point where nothing he says will be acceptable. That is, presuming that an arrest of any type is ever made again.

WHICH MEANS THIS has the potential to become yet another unsolved crime. It will become all too similar to those shootings two years ago at a Lane Bryant store at a strip mall in southwest suburban Tinley Park.

We’re still waiting for something resembling an arrest in those incidents. Too many people have had to just accept it mentally that the Lane Bryant incident that left five women dead may well become one of those crimes that someone “gets away” with.

At least Dorian’s own attorney told reporter-types Tuesday night that we should be “concerned” that the string of shootings remains unsolved.

Let’s not forget that the real victim in all of this is Roland Alonso, a 45-year-old construction worker who died after being shot Oct. 5 while working with others to rehabilitate a home near Beecher.

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