During his tumultuous stint as Chicago’s top cop, former police Supt. David Brown often touted the importance of taking guns off the streets.
“Each gun recovered, regardless of how, is a potential life saved,” Brown said at a news conference at police headquarters in June 2022.
Under his watch, the number of gun recoveries jumped as police leaders sought to tamp down spiking violent crime, with cops from the Calumet District helping to lead the charge.
How exactly a group of those officers recovered at least five guns is now being investigated by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the city’s police oversight agency. In one case, a suspicious seizure was flagged by the FBI.
At least four officers from the Calumet District were relieved of their police powers earlier this year as COPA investigated claims they recovered guns without making arrests, then filed bogus paperwork to cover their tracks.
On March 3, two days after Brown announced he was stepping down, Andrea Kersten, COPA’s chief administrator, sent a letter to top police officials that laid bare the accusations and pushed for the officers to be benched.
Her letter also raised questions over whether the officers snatched up guns, drugs and cash without turning in the evidence.
The Chicago Sun-Times isn’t naming the officers because they haven’t been charged with any crime or otherwise formally been accused of wrongdoing.
The alleged misconduct began on June 15, 2021, when two of the officers made a traffic stop in the 500 block of West 127th Place that was captured on body-worn camera, according to the letter. It said the video showed them finding a stack of cash and a backpack with a large amount of marijuana, yet the property wasn’t inventoried, and there was no record of any arrests.
One of the officers did inventory a Glock 40 handgun that day that was purportedly discovered in the 11600 block of South Peoria Street, though the report listed a case number connected to a theft involving welding tools in another police district.
On July 7, 2021, an officer filled out a case report in which he said he found a Canik TP9 handgun in the yard of an abandoned home after he was flagged down in the first block of West 105th Street. A car assigned to that officer and two other cops drove by the home that day but didn’t stop, according to the letter.
Last December, the FBI notified COPA “of another possible incident of an improper gun seizure” the same day that appears related to the report about the Canik TP9.
Body-camera footage showed three officers talking with a person who admitted to having a gun in his fanny pack but said he was holding it for his cousin, the letter said. One of the officers took the gun, and another began talking about “F/P” — found property. The officer who was recording then turned off his camera.
There were no arrests or other records of that interaction.
The gun was “strikingly similar” to the weapon that was purportedly found outside the abandoned property, according to the COPA letter.
Three of the officers later found a pistol in the trunk of a car during a traffic stop on July 16, 2021. They detained three people, one who said the gun belonged to his father and that he had no criminal record.
The exchange was recorded on body camera.
One officer tried to hand the IDs of the men they stopped to the cop who found the gun.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” the officer who found the gun said.
The other officer then shut off his camera, according to the COPA letter.
The camera of one of the other officers then captured someone saying, “Keep the gun, I don’t care.”
According to the letter, one of the cops submitted a report a day later saying officers responded to a call of a person with a gun and saw three people run from a home in the 10400 block of South Maryland Street. The officers said they found two guns, a Canik TP9 and a Glock 19, that were inventoried in separate reports.
COPA found the GPS records of the vehicles used by the officers that day “directly contradict” the officers’ account.
“Recovery of firearms more than likely did not happen according to [the] report filed,” according to the letter.
The final incident, on the night of Oct. 5, 2021, prompted a complaint that led to the initial COPA investigation. Officers stopped a woman who was waiting for a bus in the 12100 block of South Michigan Avenue with her boyfriend and kids. One of the officers grabbed a .380-caliber handgun from her fanny pack, the letter said.
“We understand why you have this weapon,” it quoted the officer as saying. “We’ll let you go. This never happened.”
Two of the officers later said in a report they found the gun while responding to a ShotSpotter alert in the 100 block of East 127th Street. But surveillance-camera footage and GPS records show “it would be impossible for the officers to have recovered the firearm in the location and manner stated,” according to the letter.
Kersten said the accusations had been referred to both the FBI and county prosecutors.
Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, said the matter “is under review.” The FBI didn’t respond to questions.
Two of the officers, both who joined the Chicago Police Department after 2015, are facing a lawsuit in federal court over their involvement in a 2021 arrest of a 47-year-old man who says police dragged him from his home when he answered the door in a towel. He says he lost the towel he was wearing and was naked in his yard as his neighbors watched.
“The officers took no action to help him cover his body,” the lawsuit says.
According to a police report, the man got angry at the woman who lived next door for trying to cancel the yard service his father provided for her. The man threatened to kill the woman, entered her home and grabbed her arm before leaving, the report said. The man pleaded guilty to trespassing and disorderly conduct, court records show.
Another officer, who joined the police department in 2006, was accused of helping to cover up another cop’s beating of a man in custody. The man said he was struck by a baton and suffered a cracked collar bone in 2019 in the Lincoln police district on the North Side.
The man, who sued the city in federal court, got a $98,000 legal settlement last year, city records show.
Records show 13 complaints have been filed against the 53-year-old officer, one of which was sustained for failing to notify the 911 center that he was chasing a stolen vehicle in 2011. A one-day suspension was recommended in that case.
In five other cases, he was accused of conducting illegal searches, but those complaints weren’t sustained.
