Senior leadership of the Chicago Police Department were largely silent as detectives argued over whether or not to charge an unarmed autistic teenager with assaulting an off-duty officer who had shot the teen early on an August morning in 2017. But that changed more than a year later when they demanded case reports back up the officer’s claim he’d felt threatened before opening fire, veteran officer Isaac Lambert testified Wednesday.
In his second day on the stand in a whistleblower case against CPD, Lambert choked up several times as he described his reaction to being “dumped” from his hard-won position as a detective sergeant and sent to work the midnight shift in patrol division after he refused to alter reports to list Officer Khalid Muhammad as a victim in an off-duty shooting of 18-year-old Ricardo Hayes.
Lambert said his supervisor summoned him to his office days after filing the final report on the case — one that did not designate Muhammad as a “victim.”
“He calls me in the office and tells me, ‘Hey, man. Got to tell you something: the chief doesn’t want you here anymore,’” Lambert said. “I was shocked... five days after submitting this report, I’m dumped.”
“Dumped” is CPD slang for transferred to an undesirable posting after running afoul of a supervisor, according to Lambert, who wiped tears from his eyes as he talked about his frustration and feelings of alienation from his peers after the demotion— which also cost him about $55,000 per year in overtime when...
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