North Chicago drops action to revoke injured police officers' pensions, but officers say legal action wasted time and money
NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. (CBS) -- A group of North Chicago police officers were on leave – some for brain injuries – and came to us saying the city was fighting them to get back to work despite their medical challenges.
CBS 2 Investigator Megan Hickey has been exposing this story for nearly three years. Now, after all that time and legal fighting, those officers are getting answers.
"You know the people that started this whole ordeal - I don't think they understand the level of chaos that it creates unless they go through it themselves," said Trent Robinson.
Robinson gave the City of North Chicago 18 years as a police officer before he suffered a career-ending neck injury during a traffic stop.
Robinson then lost his eye in an unrelated accident.
For years, he has been worried about how he's going to make ends meet when his hard-earned pension was taken away.
Robinson: "It is 80 percent of what my family relies on."
Hickey: "Wow – 80 percent. So that would be huge if they took it away from you."
Robinson: "Yes ma'am."
Another officer, Emir King, went on disability with a career-ending shoulder injury in 2016 after 11 years on the job in North Chicago.
That was followed by emergency brain surgery in 2020.
"I was actually hospitalized originally during the first recall," King said.
King, Robinson, and six other disabled officers were recalled in 2019 to work as 911 dispatchers - a job for which they'd never been trained for and said they could not physically do - because North Chicago's chief said they were "dramatically understaffed."
We first exposed the controversy in July of 2019.
"Take a person's livelihood away after they already made a pretty significant sacrifice - it's outrageous," Brian Carder, who receives line-of-duty disability pension, told us in 2019.
Since then, the City of North Chicago has transferred all dispatch operations to the Village of Mundelein.
And then last week, on the eve of an important hearing, the officers got a motion that basically said, "Never mind." The motion called for the dismissal of the case for revoking the pensions for officers King and Robinson, and a third pensioner, Lawrence Wade.
"It was just a complete waste of time, because, you know, even if you looked at what they were trying to do, as I said, it was completely illogical," King said.
"We wish it was done earlier so these guys didn't lose sleep for the last two years," said attorney Brent Eames.
Eames represents the officers said he was surprised by the motion to dismiss the case — but hope this sets a precent for other cases involving disabled pensioners.
"The city should be grateful to these officers and not try to strip them of these benefits that they need to feed their families and live their lives," Eames said.
"You know long as I'm breathing, you know, hopefully, nobody else has to go through nothing like this," added Robinson.
Robinson and King say we should really be asking how much time, money, and energy was wasted on this case.
"Taxpayers and anybody else should be questioning why the city leadership decided to do this," King said.
The City of North Chicago sent the following statement about the motion to dismiss:
"The City of North Chicago successfully and seamlessly transferred all dispatch operations to the Village of Mundelein. With this changeover, Mayor Rockingham and Chief Perez made the decision that the Pension Board hearing had become a distraction and the matter was no longer worth pursuing. The City voluntarily dismissed the case. The City thanks the pensioners who fulfilled their responsibility and responded to help the City staff the dispatch center during the City's time of need."
We did submit a Freedom of Information Act for the total cost of this case, which went nowhere.
