Former CPD officer faces felony charges of perjury, forgery over traffic tickets, city inspector general says
A former Chicago police officer has been charged with multiple felonies of perjury and forgery, the city’s Office of Inspector General announced Tuesday afternoon.
Jeffrey Kriv was a Chicago Police Department officer from Aug. 5, 1996, until earlier this month, according to a statement from the inspector general. Kriv is facing four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, according to documents filed Tuesday morning in Cook County Circuit Court.
Both offenses are punishable by probation or up to two to five years in the Illinois Department of Corrections, the inspector general said.
Kriv, 56, appeared in court Tuesday and was ordered released from jail on his own recognizance, according to court records.
According to Assistant State’s Attorney Thomas Fryska, Kriv was fired Jan. 10, before his retirement set for Jan. 20, due to the charges.
Kriv was employed as a CPD officer at the time of the alleged offenses, the inspector general said. The office’s investigation revealed that between 2009 and 2022, Kriv successfully disputed multiple parking tickets and moving violations related to his personal vehicles by providing fraudulent documents as evidence or making false statements in person during department of administrative hearings.
“The truthfulness and credibility of police officers is foundational to the fair administration of justice, and to CPD’s effectiveness as a law enforcement agency,” Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said in a written statement. “We are grateful to CPD and to the state’s attorney’s office for their partnership in this investigation.”
The inspector general’s office was initially contacted on Feb. 8, 2022, about a potentially fraudulent parking ticket related to Kriv, Fryska said.
The inspector general learned that Kriv had contested a parking ticket on Oct. 13, 2021, to one of his personal vehicles by claiming that he had received a second citation for the same parking violation just 15 minutes earlier, Fryska said. But the copy of the ticket was signed by an Officer “D. Stuart” with Kriv’s star number, and was actually a ticket Kriv had written as a CPD officer on a different date to a different vehicle.
The inspector general’s investigation also revealed that Kriv, starting in 2013, had resolved 44 automated ticket violations by going to court. He would testify that his girlfriend had stolen his vehicle and was driving it on the day and time each ticket was issued, Fryska said.
Kriv would also provide the administrative law judge with fraudulent police reports to support his claims, Fryska said.
Specifically, from January 2021 to September 2022, Kriv appeared at four in-person hearings where he disputed four different automated traffic violations issued to his personal BMW, Fryska said.
On those dates, he would provide the judge with a forged police report, claiming the vehicle had been stolen by his girlfriend, Fryska said. In all four of these incidents, the court retained a copy of the police report, which all appeared to be identical apart from their dates.
The total cost of the five tickets that were dismissed on the basis on Kriv’s false information was $330, Fryska said. But going back through, the total cost of all 44 dismissed tickets based on the forged documents and false testimony about his girlfriend stealing his vehicle was about $3,665.
Kriv’s next court date is Feb. 23, according to court records.
Chicago Tribune’s Madeline Buckley contributed.
