False reporting at MCSD

Gus Philpott
Woodstock Advocate
June 8, 2010

This one is for "Notawannabee", who recently wrote a comment that included the following statement "False accident reporting... Figment of your imagination, you are trying to make up issues where none exist" and thought I shouldn't be complaining about it.

Consider these facts:

Deputy started U-turn from highway shoulder and hits right side of car passing.
MCSD sergeant investigated the crash (didn't call Illinois State Police).
Sergeant put civilian driver as Unit 1, the at-fault vehicle.
Sergeant put deputy as Unit 2 AND recorded the contributory cause of the accident as "2 Failure to yield right-of-way".
County refused to pay for damage to Unit 1, because it was listed as the (more) at-fault vehicle.
Driver of Unit 1 was not cited.
Deputy was not cited.
Sergeant refused to return civilian's telephone call about correcting the report.

Does the "2" mean Unit 2 (the deputy)?

There is no requirement for a vehicle on a highway to yield the right-of-way to a vehicle on the shoulder waiting to make a U-turn.

In your wildest imagination, can you find any way to think that a civilian who caused an accident and damaged a squad car would not be ticketed? Clearly, the civilian did not cause that crash!

The deputy had a prisoner in the rear seat of the squad car, yet he still had his overheads on. They should have been turned off, once he was ready to roll. You can't use your overheads to transport a prisoner to the jail, and you can't use them to create a break in traffic so that you can make a U-turn.

The false part of the report? The deputy should have been listed as Unit 1, the at-fault vehicle.

In fact, I heard that initially he was Unit 1, but he persuaded the sergeant to switch the order of vehicles in the report. And I heard that several deputies were very unhappy about that decision.