Pubdate: Thu, 02 Mar 2006
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2006 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: David Heinzmann, Staff Reporter
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption - United States)

COP FIRED OVER DRUG-PLANTING CASE

The Chicago Police Department has fired an officer who was accused of 
helping to plant drugs in the car of a Chicago Public Schools teacher 
as a favor to her estranged husband, city officials said.

The Police Board terminated Kevin P. Morrison on Feb. 16 for not 
cooperating with a police investigation that grew out of a case in 
which the city eventually had to settle a federal lawsuit.

Morrison was accused of planting cocaine and tablets of the club drug 
Ecstasy in the woman's car and then alerting two other police 
officers, who were not involved in any wrongdoing, to stop and search her car.

The woman, Andrea Sullivan, spent the night in jail, but all charges 
were later dropped, and she sued the city. At the time, she was 
engaged in a child custody battle and a divorce with her husband, 
William Sullivan.

In the Police Board's ruling, they found Morrison guilty of making a 
false report.

Morrison, a police officer since 1991, was most recently assigned to 
public housing on the North Side.

An internal investigation in 2004 had recommended that Morrison be 
suspended for 30 days, the department's maximum discipline short of 
firing. But Supt. Philip Cline overrode the finding and sought 
Morrison's termination.

In another matter, Cline has moved to fire another police official 
who was convicted late last year of telephone harassment of a woman 
whose number he found in a police report she had filed.

The department is seeking to terminate Lt. Richard Guerrero, a former 
deputy chief of the department, who pursued a woman out of the Wood 
District headquarters, followed her in a police car and attempted to 
make contact with her, police said.

After she drove off without stopping, he returned to the station, 
pulled her phone number from her report and called her 10 times over 
the course of several hours on April 19, 2005, asking her for a date.

The woman later returned to the Wood District to complain about Guerrero.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman