A while back we learned about Jeffrey Kriv, the Chicago police officer accused of lying under oath 44 times to get out of speeding, parking and red light camera tickets involving his personal vehicles. Kriv racked up dozens of traffic tickets and had them dismissed by testifying each time that his girlfriend had stolen his car. The guy is a world-class scumbag, and it’s about time he paid for his crimes.
Prosecutors in Illinois have been forced to drop at least 15 court cases that hinged on the word Kriv, who’s now charged with perjury and forgery. In his 26 years as a Chicago piglet, Kriv was recognized for being one of the city’s most prolific drunken-driving enforcers. This means that many more pending cases in which he was an arresting officer could be in jeopardy.
Kriv retired back in January, conveniently just before he was charged criminally. He has faced nearly 100 misconduct complaints from citizens and even fellow officers in his time on the force. Prosecutors charged him in January with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all felonies, in connection with four of the traffic tickets he accrued. He has predictably pleaded not guilty.
But the Chicago Police Department knew in early 2022 that the Office of Inspector General was investigating Kriv for lying to get out of tickets. In late October of last year, the state’s attorney’s office added Kriv to a long list of officers whose credibility issues meant the office would not call them to testify in criminal cases, sometimes referred to as the do-not-call list. Read that sentence again. There exists a list of law enforcement officers so untrustworthy and corrupt that they can’t be relied on to testify in court. For some reason, Chicago PD still kept Kriv on the force until his retirement in January.
I know we’re taught to trust and believe authority figures, and that’s fine when it comes to our parents, teachers, or even librarians, but it’s really about time we stopped buying anything the police tell us.
Side Items
New Cop City: A proposal for a new training facility for Baltimore’s police and fire departments has come back with a massive price tag of $330 million. I’m not sure what kinds of training could possibly warrant blowing that much money, but the deputy BPD commissioner described the project as a “tactical village”. This price tag would cost nearly four times as much as Atlanta’s heavily-protested CopCity. For anyone in the Baltimore area wondering where this money could come from, I recommend you take a closer look at your taxes in the near future and consider picketing this enormous waste of resources
The Hunt for Nessie: This weekend, mystery hunters and conspiracy theorists converged on a Scottish lake to look for signs of the mythical Loch Ness Monster. The Loch Ness Center said researchers were trying to seek evidence of Nessie using thermal-imaging drones, infrared cameras and a hydrophone to detect underwater sounds in the lake’s murky waters. The two-day event is billed as the biggest survey of the lake in 50 years, and includes volunteers scanning the water from boats and the lakeshore, with others around the world joining in with webcams. It seems like a whole lot of effort to find a beast that was probably never real to begin with, but then again there are people who spend their entire lives searching for love, which can be a different kind of mythical beast
Liverpool Matchweek 3: