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.”
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.