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This story is part of a partnership focusing on police misconduct in Champaign County between the Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project of the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, and IPM Newsroom, which provides news about Illinois & in-depth reporting on Agriculture, Education, the Environment, Health, and Politics, powered by Illinois Public Media. This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.
By Farrah Anderson and Diana Leane, Invisible Institute
NOTE: This story was republished in The Appeal.
Champaign resident Rita Conerly called the police at 4:22 p.m. on Oct. 10, 2020, because her former partner — who she lived with for over a decade — was outside her home.
Champaign Police Officer Jonathan Kristensen responded to the call. First, he spoke with the caller, who shares children with her former partner. She told Officer Kristensen that her former partner did not have a driver’s license, but was driving anyway.
Officer Kristensen then asked Conerly if she wanted a present that her former partner, whom she had previously taken out an order of protection against, had brought her daughter.
“That is an insult,” she later told a dispatcher when she called to complain. “That is not a way to serve and/or protect me.”
She said she did not want the present, and Officer Kristensen approached her former partner. After speaking with him for only two minutes, Officer Kristensen said he would “let you guys go on your separate ways,” which the former partner agreed to.
The officer only spoke to Conerly for a minute and a half and left without taking a report, even after she told him the order of protection against her former partner had expired weeks earlier.
When he left, Officer Kristensen notified dispatchers, “Advice given. Spoke w all parties.”
That week, Conerly filed a complaint against the officer who responded to the call. Officer Kristensen failed to follow protocol and protect her from her abuser, she wrote in the complaint.
“He didn’t ask me for my name. He didn’t ask me for any other information for the incident that happened,” she said in an interview. “He did not ask for anything.”
Champaign resident Rita Conerly writes “Protect Women” using chalk outside of the Champaign Police Department on September 28, 2023. Conerly filed a complaint against the Champaign Police after an officer failed to file a report after she called the police during a domestic violence incident.Farrah Anderson / Illinois Public Media and the Invisible Institute
The Illinois Domestic Violence Act requires officers to file a police report when investigating “an alleged incident of abuse, neglect, or exploitation between family or household members,” something the Champaign Police Department’s policies also acknowledge.
The department mandates that if a person leaves and may return and batter the other individual, the officer is obligated to assist the other person to find a safe haven and obtain a temporary order of protection — not simply instruct the apparent subject of physical abuse to leave the area.
Conerly said her experience proved to her that the Champaign Police Department does not know how to handle domestic violence situations.
“I didn’t feel listened to. I didn’t feel respected. I didn’t feel like they were going to respond to me appropriately,” Conerly said. The Invisible Institute generally does not identify survivors of intimate partner violence, but Conerly consented to tell her story on the record.
Two allegations in Conerly’s complaint against Officer Kristensen were sustained: That he failed to investigate a reported crime and to document that crime in a police report. The police department told Conerly that two of her allegations were sustained, but she said she was never told if Officer Kristensen was disciplined.
“As a person who has previously been a victim of his, I, in that moment, again, [was] feeling like a victim” — this time of the CPD, she said.
The situation was clearly a domestic violence incident based on Conerly’s allegations: Her former partner was harassing her, they have a child together and her order of protection against him had recently expired, investigation documents stated.
The CPD’s investigation into her complaint found that Officer Kristensen’s conduct violated CPD Rule 5(A)(3), which states, “Each officer shall take appropriate action on the occasion of a criminal offense, disorder, or other act or condition requiring police attention while on or off duty.” Officer Kristensen was issued a letter of reprimand in May 2021, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Invisible Institute.
A department spokesperson did not make Officer Kristensen available for comment.
What Conerly didn’t know is that, just two months after she filed her complaint, the CPD would order a department-wide retraining on exactly this issue, due to regular violations like Kristensen’s.
However, experts interviewed by the Invisible Institute have questioned how effective that retraining, ordered by then-Chief Anthony Cobb, really was.