CHICAGO — The former Chief of Detectives for the Chicago Police Department testified Monday that she transferred one of her former subordinates — a sergeant who eventually brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the city — because he failed to perform basic duties of a supervisor.
Melissa Staples, who led the CPD’s Detective Division August 2016 until January 2020, told jurors that she removed Sgt. Isaac Lambert from the division after learning that he assigned a rookie detective to investigate a controversial police shooting on the Far South Side in August 2017.
“I felt like [with] his experience in the Detective Division, he should’ve known better,” Staples said during her several hours of testimony Monday. “You don’t do this. You don’t assign a rookie to a police-involved shooting.”
Beyond that, Staples added, she moved to reassign Lambert after she learned that several reports on the shooting remained incomplete more than a year after the shooting occurred.
“The reports sat there for a year-and-a-half,” Staples added. “I felt like it was a disservice to the victim in this case. [Lambert] had enough experience in the Detective Division to know better.”
Staples testimony came on the ninth day of trial in Lambert’s whistleblower lawsuit that he filed against the city in 2019. Lambert alleges that he was removed from the Detective Division — “dumped” in police parlance — after he expressed concerns about the legality of the shooting of Ricardo Hayes, an unarmed...
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