Larry Hall was not even three years into his career as a Flossmoor police officer when he began having sex in the summer of 2007 with an 18-year-old woman he had met months earlier while working as a resource officer at the south suburban high school she attended.
Hall and the woman had sex in his squad car multiple times during the next two years while Hall was on duty, including once when he was notified of a car accident and had to turn on his emergency lights and drop her off to get to the scene. He lied to investigators more than a dozen times when they confronted him and was fired, according to court records.
For most officers, such an offense would end their careers. But a little more than four years later, Hall returned to law enforcement, rising to become the acting deputy chief in the nearby Village of Robbins, where he oversees internal affairs and background checks.
Robbins Mayor Darren Bryant said that “sometimes we take what we can get” when it comes to the difficult task of hiring part-time, low-paid police officers.
“Just because you got fired doesn’t mean you can’t grow or you can’t learn from your last job,” he said. “It’s almost a restorative practice.”
Robbins has long been a dumping ground for police officers with troubled histories. In the past year alone, Robbins’ part-time police department employed Hall as well as two police officers whom the Chicago Police Department fired for lying about what they saw the night Laquan McDonald was murdered, and an officer whose history of past misconduct must be disclosed to defense attorneys any time he testifies in court. That officer was fired for submitting a vacation request containing the forged signature of his police chief.
Departments like Robbins that most often hire fired cops are at the mercy of diminished property tax bases to fund their operations. They pay just above minimum wage and hire fired cops who then use their status as police officers to secure higher-paying private security jobs or to salvage their policing careers before going elsewhere. In turn, residents are often left with a police force that gets more attention for the misdeeds of its officers and the crimes it doesn’t solve than the ones it does.
University of Chicago law professor John Rappaport, who studied the phenomenon of “wandering officers” with checkered pasts jumping to small departments in Florida, said the problem locally is consistent with his analysis.
“We found that cops who got fired tended to move to small agencies with fewer resources,” Rappaport said. “I don’t know if it’s as real as they say, but people in law enforcement say there’s a real hiring and retention crisis. You can easily imagine a situation where an under-resourced town that can only pay minimum wage has to take any licensed, warm body.”
'The worst of all worlds'
Robbins, tucked along the banks of the Little Calumet River, is a proud village with a remarkable history.
The hometown of celebrities such as hoops legend Dwayne Wade, actress Keke Palmer and Nichelle Nichols, who played the pioneering role of Uhura on the original Star Trek series, Robbins is one of the oldest majority-Black incorporated towns in America.
It is also burdened by a feeble commercial and industrial tax base, a shrinking population and an infrastructure plagued by disrepair. About 34% of the village’s 4,500 residents live in poverty, according to census estimates, and a 2021 financial report showed the village posting a $1.3 million deficit, spending about 33% more than what was collected.
Accordingly, the pay for Village of Robbins employees such as police officers lags well behind what wealthier municipalities can afford.
Former Robbins Police Commander Anthony Burnett, who resigned from the part-time department in March, said that pay for patrol officers begins at $15 per hour. This is for a village that reported 43 violent crimes in 2020, according to the most recent FBI crime statistics.
For comparison, Arlington Heights, which has more than 16 times the population of Robbins, also reported 43 violent crimes that year. At the beginning of this year, full-time pay for Arlington Heights police officers started at $80,500.
Robbins Village Board Member Tiffany Robinson, the public safety chair, said that their financial precarity extends beyond the wages. Robinson said the village is so strapped for cash that it is often unable to send police officers to the training academy, which costs $2,000 per officer for part-time training that the state reimburses. So they’ll hire officers who have already been trained from other departments.
“If you’re not generating property tax dollars and you don’t have high revenue coming in it will definitely present a problem,” Robinson said. “There's really no comparison, which is another reason why officers leave, which is the low pay.”
Burnett said their department relies on a few officers who retired from other departments, but the majority “were fired from other departments or can’t get hired by other departments.”
“It’s pretty much that Robbins is the last resort,” he said.
This combination of low-paid, part-time officers tasked with addressing significant violent crime has resulted in a chaotic, dysfunctional and scandal-prone police force.
Antonio L. Madix was hired by the department in December 2022 despite being arrested for allegedly throwing his wife to the ground and choking her five years ago. That case was eventually dismissed. He was fired in August last year after he remarried and was charged with allegedly pushing the face of that wife and shooting a gun through his car windshield and into a garage door during a domestic incident. Madix, who later pleaded guilty to criminal damage to property while the other charges were dropped, hung up when reached for comment.
Another Robbins police officer, Sharita R. Horton, resigned in April 2023 after she crashed into a house and was charged by a Cook County Sheriff’s officer that previous January with her second DUI in a dozen years, records show. She refused to take a sobriety test and claimed in a brief interview the arrest was retaliation by Robbins police. The charge was later dropped. In an unrelated court matter, she is being sued in Cook County after her pitbull allegedly bit a child’s face at her home, which she said didn’t happen.
In 2013, Robbins Police Chief Mel Davis was fired after state officials discovered that the law enforcement credentials of his hand-picked internal affairs investigator, Douglas J. Smith, were phony. Smith’s materials included a photograph of the badge that fictional character Sgt. Joe Friday used in the television show “Dragnet.” Davis’ interim replacement, Hashi Jaco, was accused of domestic battery by two ex-wives but the charges were later dropped. He later hired his third wife onto the department even after she failed to complete basic training. Jaco was later fired in January 2014.
These three men were hired to clean up the department after the Cook County Sheriff’s Office stepped in to fill a manpower shortage and found hundreds of rape kits and rape cases that were never fully investigated, including one case that implicated the grandson of the police chief, Johnny Holmes. The chief later resigned after he was charged with drunk driving twice in three years.
After the rape kits were discovered, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office offered in 2013 to take over police operations, which they provided to the poor suburb of Ford Heights at a cost of about $3.5 million annually to the county. Robbins officials declined. More recently, the sheriff’s office handled all calls for the village following a police walk out in 2021.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in an interview the unpredictability of the problems that exist in poor communities’ police departments makes them difficult to plan for, whether it’s scattershot staffing or squad cars that stop working.
“This is more your day-to-day operations where there’s faltering systems constantly,” he said. “This is really sort of the worst of all worlds when you think about it.”
'Somebody rather than nobody'
Bryant, the Robbins mayor, acknowledged the problems in the village’s police department after a video came out two years ago showing Robbins Deputy Chief Byron Redmond drinking alcohol inside his police office.
Bryant issued a statement saying he was suspending Redmond because, in the Village of Robbins, “image matters.”
Redmond was fired but then rehired as a sergeant, and he later sued Bryant and the village. The lawsuit alleged other Robbins administrators drank on the job including Bryant, who lacked the authority to fire him.
Redmond said he was rehired after enough Robbins residents complained about his firing. He noted that after he was fired, locals still called him with crime tips because he had his “ears out there.”
“Basically, I dealt with people appropriately,” he said. “I was very fair with people and that’s why they wanted me back.”
Byrant said in an interview Redmond’s allegations were false, but that he deserved a second chance, which is often the case for officers coming to Robbins.
“I’ll say this, you need someone to respond,” he said. “It’s not like we don't have anybody responding. It’s somebody rather than nobody.”
Since 2000, about 17% of all officers hired by the department — 46 altogether — joined or rejoined the department directly after getting fired, state data shows. By comparison, the Chicago Police Department hired or rehired just 15 officers this way. Entry-level pay for full-time Chicago police officers begins at $54,600 and jumps to $82,500 within 18 months.
Robbins is in a situation similar to the nearby impoverished “inner-ring” suburbs of Chicago such as nearby Dixmoor, Markham and Phoenix, which have hired or rehired 76 police officers directly after they were fired. But this phenomenon is not unique to Cook County.
More than 16% of all police officers that worked in the former Southwestern Illinois town of Alorton came to the department after being fired in the past 24 years. Three years ago, Alorton merged with the two nearby municipalities to become Cahokia Heights. Nearly 60% of Alorton residents lived in poverty before the merger.
For most of these police officers, carrying a badge and a gun part-time isn’t the apex of their careers, but a resume builder for higher-paying side jobs.
One former Robbins police officer, Clifton Heard, came to the department in 2016 after the University of Illinois-Chicago Police Department fired him for an off-duty fight in the Little Italy neighborhood in 2015 where he removed his duty weapon from the waistband of his pants and handed it to another officer, his then-girlfriend, discipline records show. In a deposition filed in his wrongful termination lawsuit, Heard said he was paid twice as much in private security as he made in Robbins, where he made $10.25 per hour.
For other fired officers, Robbins is a useful reentry point before quickly moving on.
Janet Mondragon came to the Robbins Police Department about two years ago after being fired from the Chicago Police Department for lying to investigators about what she saw on Oct. 20, 2014, the night Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed the 17-year-old McDonald, eventually leading to Van Dyke’s conviction on a second-degree murder charge.
Mondragon told investigators that while driving behind McDonald, she saw Van Dyke and former police officer Joseph Walsh and heard them order McDonald to drop his knife, which she claimed he was waving. She said that as she “looked down” to park the car, she heard shooting but “did not know who fired the shots,” and also claimed that while she and Van Dyke were colleagues, they did not socialize outside of work other than attending a Fraternal Order of Police picnic together.
Later, investigators found that Mondragon and Van Dyke were friends, they texted sometimes numerous times per day in the weeks before the shooting. Nine days before the shooting, they texted 70 times.
The Chicago Police Board fired her in July 2019 after determining that Mondragon needed only a few seconds to park, the dashcam showed that her car was moving during a portion of the shooting and the shooting lasted 15 seconds; meaning, she would have seen at least part of it. Mondragon challenged the ruling but lost twice on appeal.
About a year after Mondragon joined Robbins in 2022, the department hired her former CPD colleague, Ricardo Viramontes. Viramontes was also fired for lying about what happened during McDonald’s murder. The Chicago Police Board ruled that Viramontes lied to investigators when he said that McDonald “continued to move and attempted to get back up off the ground . . . with the knife still in his hand,” after he was shot 16 times. Viramontes resigned in January from Robbins. He did not respond to multiple messages.
Mondragon bounced around the suburbs, making a stop at the Saint Xavier University Police Department before landing at the Bridgeview Police Department, where she now works part-time. Both she and Viramontes are on the Brady List, a document that tracks officers who have been charged with crimes or accused of serious misconduct. They appear on the do-not-call portion of the list, meaning Cook County prosecutors are prohibited from calling them into court to testify due to their misdeeds.
Bridgeview Police Chief Ricardo Mancha said the department is appealing the decision to put Mondragon on the Brady List. He said he hired Mondragon, who did not respond to multiple messages, after the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board cleared her waiver to work and she proved herself while working as a Robbins police officer.
Mancha called Mondragon “a very good officer,” and said he believed she told the truth in the McDonald case.
Up until late March, Robbins police employed another officer on the Brady List: Sheldon Crawford. Unlike Mondragon, Crawford is allowed to testify in court, but prosecutors must disclose his past misconduct or lack of credibility to defense attorneys before any of his testimony.
Crawford came to the Robbins Police Department from the similarly beleaguered Dixmoor Police Department after being fired from the Markham Police Department. Crawford was found to have submitted a vacation request bearing a forged signature of his police chief.
The Robbins Police Department fired Crawford the day after Illinois Answers Project and WGN Chicago asked village officials about his position on the Brady List. In an interview, Crawford said that was "something that didn't affect my employment, something they knew when they hired me."
The student and the cop
Hall’s history as a Flossmoor police officer was well known by the time he was hired in Robbins.
News stories chronicled his downfall and his failed attempts to sue the Flossmoor police department.
The woman told investigators in August 2009 that she was a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in 2007 and had just turned 18 when Hall, then 32, walked up to her at school and wished her a happy birthday.
Her family said she transferred to the school and was adjusting well with therapy after she moved out of the Chicago home she lived in with her mother, who dated a Chicago police officer who would beat them.
She said her relationship with Hall, the school resource officer, began a couple months later when she reported to him that someone keyed her car, Hall’s disciplinary records show. After she graduated in June 2007, Hall gave her his number and told her to call him and their sexual relationship began soon after.
The woman’s parents notified Flossmoor police in July 2009, saying they were concerned that Hall was “very controlling” of their daughter’s movements, that he became “verbally abusive” when he asked their daughter for money, and that he “supposedly gets angry when she goes out with friends or parties.” In an interview with investigators, the woman said that she gave Hall up to $4,000, which to this day she says he has not repaid.
Reached for comment, the woman told Illinois Answers and WGN Investigates that Hall “did take advantage of a young woman but people should be given a second chance.”
“Your past shouldn’t dictate your future,” said the woman, whom Illinois Answers is not naming given what happened to her and her age at the time. “I believe that people change.”
Confronted by his superiors, Hall lied a dozen times about having sex in his squad car and confessed only after being confronted repeatedly with witness testimony, according to his disciplinary records.
“From the day I got hired here, I tried to be the most honest, respected person and I made some mistakes,” Hall said to investigators, before acknowledging what happened. “I know there are going to be some serious ramifications behind this, and I’d rather walk away telling the truth. I know it’s going to cost me a lot, but I have made some mistakes, and those allegations are true.”
Further investigation showed that he sent electronic messages where he referred to Flossmoor residents as “Flossmorons” and used vulgar nicknames to describe his superiors. He was fired in November 2009.
Hall, who is Black, fought the firing in federal court, claiming it was an unequal punishment compared to the discipline issued to his white colleagues. U.S. District Judge John Lee disagreed in an opinion issued in December 2012.
“There is also nothing in the record to suggest that any of them lied during a formal investigation to cover up their actions. Indeed, the department has never had another officer have sex while on duty and subsequently lie about it,” Lee wrote in his opinion.
Hall, who declined to comment, appealed the ruling and lost again in April 2013. Less than one year later, he surfaced in the Robbins police department, where he “performed his duties over the past 10 years in a spirit of excellence and with compassion for the Village of Robbins residents,” according to a village spokesman.
Lourdes Duarte, of WGN Investigates, contributed to this story
