Karl Clermont is certain an off-duty police officer pulled a gun on him. What he doesn’t understand is why it’s taking so long for investigators to determine if the officer should face disciplinary action. “This happened over seven months ago,” he says. Clermont is a 33-year-old cabbie who grew up on the north side, graduated from Sullivan High School, and now lives in the suburbs with his wife and five-year-old son. He’s been driving a cab for five years.
He says he called out to the guy. “I said, ‘Hey, you forgot to pay your fare.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t forget. I don’t owe you shit.’”
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Clermont called 911 and says within a few minutes six police cars showed up—four marked, two unmarked. “By the time the police got there the guy had managed to get up. I hopped into a marked car—the first car to show up—and we drove down the alley looking for him.”
They found the passenger in an alley south of Armitage. “The other cars showed up and all the police get out and they draw their weapons,” says Clermont. “They told him, ‘Put your hands on your head, lock your fingers.’”
About ten minutes later, a sergeant drove up. “He said, ‘Can I see some ID?’” says Clermont. “I gave him my license. He went into the alley and talked to the other cops. He came back and asked me about the gun. I told him it was black. He says, ‘The guy says he didn’t point the gun at you.’”
Clermont says he asked the sergeant for a copy of what she’d written up. She handed him a scrap of paper with a number written on it and told him someone would call him. Later that day he went ahead and filed a complaint online with the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct, and the next day someone from the authority called and asked him to come to their office at 10 W. 35th to file a sworn complaint.
On October 28, Clermont received a letter from Ilana Rosenzweig, chief administrator for the IPRA, telling him: “IPRA is investigating the allegation of excessive force you made against a Chicago Police Department employee. The investigation has been on-going for the past six months. It still continues.”
