Chicago police officer tied to disgraced unit fired 18 years after scandal

A Chicago police officer was fired late Thursday for his role 18 years ago in one of the biggest scandals in department history.

The Police Board decided to dismiss Officer Thomas Sherry in a five to one decision for his alleged actions in the disgraced Special Operations Section, a specialized unit that was disbanded when some of its officers committed home invasions and robberies in the 2000s.

Sherry was originally taken off the street and placed on paid desk duty when he was charged criminally in the scandal, only for those charges to be dropped a few years later. But Chicago police officials kept him on desk duty for more than a decade anyway, prompting him in 2018 to file a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that the Chicago Police Department violated his due process rights by refusing to hold a disciplinary hearing in his case before the Chicago Police Board.

“No complainant, no victim, not a single person testified that Sherry did anything wrong,” Sherry’s attorney Paul Geiger wrote in a statement. “It’s truly amazing that you don’t even need evidence to prove a case in the most corrupt city in the nation, Chicago. Just another black eye for the Police Board and the City.”

While Sherry’s lawsuit made its way through the courts against the city’s Law Department, the same department filed several disciplinary charges against him in November 2020 on behalf of police Superintendent David Brown.

Sherry’s lawyers, Geiger and Ronald Dahms, made a filing to the police board last year that highlighted a controversial issue around the process of disciplining Chicago cops. Police accountability advocates have criticized city officials for lengthy delays in seeking to discipline officers, saying it’s unfair to victims of police misconduct and to the officers who are wrongly accused.

In March 2021, U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee dismissed Sherry’s lawsuit on the grounds that Sherry waited too long to file such a suit against city officials. But in the filing to the police board, his lawyers noted that the board has been asked repeatedly to decide on disciplinary cases that were “long-delayed by CPD without explanation.”

Sherry was assigned to SOS in 2006 when Cook County prosecutors charged him and other officers with armed violence and aggravated kidnapping, among other charges, alleging that the officers had robbed drug dealers and law-abiding citizens of cash and property. Sherry was suspended without pay at the time.

As the scandal deepened, the department disbanded the SOS unit, some officers resigned and the police superintendent, Phil Cline, retired not long after.

The charges against Sherry and a second officer were dropped in 2009 after evidence emerged that victims had misidentified them. Sherry was then placed on paid desk duty.

But the city often seeks to discipline officers in the absence of criminal charges, and Sherry was repeatedly named as a defendant with other officers in lawsuits linked to the SOS scandal.

It wasn’t until 2013, however, that the U.S. attorney’s office turned over evidence from the SOS scandal to the Police Department after prosecuting other officers. The department then launched its own internal investigation of Sherry and other officers who then remained on the force.

But Sherry’s 2018 lawsuit alleged that investigators from the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs never tried to interrogate him during the intervening five years.

He alleged he had never been told in writing “of any allegations of misconduct against him relating to his 2006 arrest,” the lawsuit said. “Now that 12 years have elapsed, and all potential criminal statutes of limitations have long since expired, it is clear that the City of Chicago and its Department of Police will never provide Tom Sherry with a hearing.”

According to records, Sherry was accused of five Police Department violations: violating a law or city ordinance; bringing discredit to the department; failing to promote the department’s efforts to achieve its goals; disobeying an order; and filing false reports.

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The allegations against Sherry stem from illegal searches of two residences on the North and Northwest sides on July 27, 2004, the records show.

Sherry was accused of illegally searching a residence near Irving Park Road and California Avenue without a warrant and “excessively” detaining someone who lived there for six hours in a police vehicle, according to the records.

That same day, Sherry was accused of searching another residence without a warrant, this one in the 2200 block of North Harlem Avenue.

Sherry was also accused of writing false or misleading police reports, including that narcotics were found on a resident at the Harlem address when they weren’t.

Sherry was also accused of failing to notify the department that other officers involved in the illegal searches committed wrongdoing, records show. Among those officers was Jerome Finnigan, who was eventually sentenced to 12 years in the SOS scandal.

pfry@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @paigexfry