A Chicago man has filed a lawsuit this month against the city’s police department for charges of false arrest, excessive force and violation of constitutional rights. The suit charges the department as a whole as well as six officers.
51-year-old George Roberts was pulled over “for a minor traffic violation” in the early morning hours of January 1. According to Roberts, officers ordered him to step out of the vehicle and then pushed him, threatening, “Don’t make me [expletive] shoot you!”
Roberts works as a supervising investigator with the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) and investigates cases of police misconduct as well as police-involved shootings. Officers discovered this when they searched Roberts and came across his IPRA identification. Roberts alleges that, at this point, an officer “ran back to his vehicle and turned off his vehicle’s video recording equipment.” Officers did not bring up this fact — or the fact that any video existed at all — during the initial investigation; the arrest report did not make note of surveillance footage during the incident. It was Roberts’ attorney, Timothy Fiscella, who discovered its existence during Roberts’ DUI trial.
