Joliet police detective seeks to use AG report in racial discrimination lawsuit case

A Joliet police detective is seeking to use the report of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s Office investigation of the police department in his federal racial discrimination lawsuit.

The lawsuit filed by Detective David Jackson, who is scheduled to retire March 14, has been pending in federal court since 2019. The lawsuit has reached the phase where a judge will decide the merits of the case before it heads to a jury.

The lawsuit claims the City of Joliet and its officers tried to silence Jackson, who is Black, because he spoke out against the police department’s “deeply entrenched racially discriminatory culture.”

The lawsuit claims retired Joliet Police Chief Al Roechner conspired with officers of the Crest Hill Police Department to have Jackson arrested in 2019 on a misdemeanor battery charge. Roechner and other defendants in the case have denied the allegations.

Special Prosecutor Bill Elward handled the case against Jackson, which was dismissed in 2019 when the alleged victim failed to appear in court on the day of trial.

The defendants in Jackson’s case include Roechner and former Joliet Deputy Police Chiefs Joseph Rosado and John Perona. Crest Hill Police Chief Ed Clark and retired Crest Hill Deputy Police Chief Jason Opiola have been named as defendants as well.

Jackson’s attorneys said they want to introduce the 2024 report of the attorney general’s investigation of the police department as evidence in the case because it shows the defendants allegedly “took adverse actions” against Jackson based on his race. The three-year investigation was handled through the civil rights division of the attorney general’s office.

The attorney general’s report revealed “widespread supervisory deficiencies” within the police department, which “overlooks policy violations and tolerates or ignores serious wrongdoing,” according to a court filing from Jackson’s attorney Stacey Vucko.

Vucko argued Jackson was a “victim” of the “serious deficiencies” in the police department’s internal affairs process.

“[The report shows] Roechner’s, Rosado’s, and Perona’s biased handling of the 2019 domestic complaint was not an aberration but was a part of the department’s standard biased operating procedure as it pertains to Black community members, for which Joliet must be held accountable,” Vucko said.

Joliet’s outside attorneys with Clark Baird Smith have objected to allowing the report into Jackson’s case.

Attorney Kelly Coyle said in a court filing that the report is hearsay and composed of “layers of hearsay.”

She argued the report is also not relevant to Jackson’s case and he only wants to use it to make a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument.

Coyle said the investigation was not done in a timely fashion as it took four years and there were no explanations or assurances Raoul’s team were competent to conduct the investigation.

Coyle said the police department has almost 300 employees yet investigators interviewed about 100 current and former employees. She argued the interviewees may have been biased or lacked competence to address the topics covered in the investigation.

“One will simply never know due to the lack of transparency on the face of the [attorney general] report. This makes it impossible to properly evaluate the trustworthiness of the [attorney general’s] protocol for selecting the interviewees (e.g., did they target only disgruntled employees or randomly select a representative cross-sample of individuals),” Coyle said.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Cummings plans to issue a ruling on Jackson’s request. In February, Cummings had dismissed former Joliet Mayor Bob O’Dekirk’s conspiracy lawsuit case.