A Chicago police sergeant left a family barbecue, walked into an alley, confronted a group of teenagers and threatened to slap one of them. A 17-year-old girl started filming. Prosecutors say he punched her in the head. She was diagnosed with a concussion. He is due in court today.
The charges
- Sgt. Jeremy Sikorski, 45, of the Chicago Police Department.
- Charged by the Cook County State’s Attorney with two felony counts of aggravated battery.
- The encounter was August 9, in the 5100 block of S. Merrimac Ave. in Garfield Ridge, on the Southwest Side.
- He was off duty, attending a barbecue with his family.
- Prosecutors say he approached teens in an alley, accused them of picking on younger children and threatened to slap one.
- A 17-year-old girl was filming him on her phone when he allegedly punched her in the head. She was later diagnosed with a concussion.
Sikorski has been relieved of police powers since August 11. He turned himself in on September 22, was released pending trial, and is due back in court September 30. He has not been convicted.
The thing the camera did
This is the part that generalizes beyond one sergeant.
By the prosecutors’ account, the punch landed on the person holding the phone. Not the teenagers he came to confront. The one documenting him.
It is also the reason there are charges. An off-duty officer’s word against a group of teenagers in an alley is a complaint that goes nowhere in most American cities. Video is the difference between an internal file and a felony count.
The BeezLoop Take
The honest answer to why this happens is not that officers are uniquely violent people. It is that for most of the history of American policing, the cost of hitting someone who could not prove it was zero, and the cost of hitting someone who could was also usually zero.
Look at the specific arithmetic in this case. A 45-year-old sergeant at a family barbecue decided he had authority over teenagers in an alley while off duty, out of uniform, with no call, no complaint and no jurisdiction beyond his own opinion. Then the one person who could contradict him got hit. That is not a split-second tactical error under stress. That is somebody who expected the encounter to end with his version being the only version, and who acted to make that true.
Why a girl, and why so often a woman or a teenager, is uncomfortable and worth saying plainly. It is the physics of who is least likely to hit back, least likely to be believed, and most likely to be characterized afterward as hysterical or aggressive. Officers who would never swing at a 30-year-old man in that alley swing at the 17-year-old with the phone, and the pattern in cases like this is consistent enough that it is not a coincidence.
We would also say what this case is not. Sikorski was off duty, and treating this as an indictment of patrol policy misses it. The problem it illustrates is narrower and harder: a badge changes how a person understands his own authority even when he is not working, and departments have almost no mechanism for that. He was relieved of police powers two days after the incident, which is fast and to the department’s credit.
And the concussion should not get lost under the policy argument. A grown man hit a teenage girl in the head hard enough to injure her brain, because she was recording him. Whatever the trial produces, that is what is alleged.
If the girl had not been filming, does this case exist at all?
If the girl had not been filming, does this case exist at all?
What is a department supposed to do about an off-duty officer who believes his authority follows him to a barbecue?
What is a department supposed to do about an off-duty officer who believes his authority follows him to a barbecue?
Related: a Georgia sergeant described punching and tasing a man on his own bodycam.
Sources: Chicago Sun-Times · WGN-TV · CWB Chicago · Cook County State’s Attorney
