I’ve been following this story now for a couple of years. Even for the CPD, it’s amazing that they haven’t “solved” this one yet – wait, did I just say it’s amazing? Nah, it’s understandable; ignore it and it’ll go away. Just like all those ignorant scum losers tortured into confessions. a who knows, who cares mentality. wait, is this an article about Chicago or Bolingbrook? i get confused sometimes…
Geinosky’s case even inspired Yates to invent the Problem-O-Meter, which tracks how long it takes a business or government agency — in this case, the Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division — to resolve a complaint. As of Friday, that would be 744 days. And counting.
All of the tickets were issued by officers in the Targeted Response Unit, a special team that fights crimes in city “hot spots.” Someone apparently thought it was fun to write phony tickets, forcing Geinosky to go to court eight times to avoid paying thousands of dollars in fines. Each time, the tickets were quickly dismissed.
Thirteen of them were signed by the same officer, and those 13 tickets — though written at four different locations, in four different months — were numbered sequentially. That means there was a special ticket book somewhere that came out only when it was time to yank Geinosky’s chain again. But there also were other tickets, from other books, signed by other officers.
In every case, Geinosky learned about the supposed violations through the mail. Not once did he find a ticket on his windshield. That’s because his car wasn’t parked at the locations noted on the tickets. Some of them were even issued after he’d sold the car, and the license plates had been removed and stashed in his garage.
It’s hard to say which is more disturbing: That this sort of thing went on, or that the department’s internal police still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it.
More than three years ago, Geinosky contacted a unit supervisor, but he never got a response. So he filed a formal complaint with the Independent Police Review Authority, which forwarded it to the Internal Affairs Division, which closed the case immediately because hey, Internal Affairs doesn’t investigate parking tickets. As if Geinosky was asking Internal Affairs to rule on whether his car was parked too close to a fire hydrant.
So Geinosky called the Problem Solver, who wrote about the case for the first time on Feb. 24, 2009.
Right away, two things happened: Internal Affairs opened an investigation, and the tickets stopped coming.
But two years later, the sleuths at Internal Affairs are still combing through clues, or something. Every once in awhile, Yates calls for an update, and it’s always the same: The investigation is ongoing.
We’re starting to think the Police Department has its own device, the Stonewall-O-Meter: Every time Geinosky’s case appears in the Tribune — this makes 16 — everyone in Internal Affairs gets the afternoon off. No wonder it’s taking so long.
What’s the big deal? It’s not as if officers were delivering electrical shocks to the genitals of crime suspects to coerce them into confessing, perhaps the most famous instance in which the department proved utterly incapable of policing itself.
But harassing a law-abiding citizen with phony parking tickets isn’t mischief; it’s malice. Every day that Geinosky’s case drags on sends a message to other law-abiding citizens that this sort of thing is tolerated. It’s a poor reflection on the department, all the way to the top.
This isn’t the crime of the century. It’s somebody running amok. Solve it already.
That makes everyone else look bad on the CPD…booo…it was probably Maloney!