Former southwest Illinois cop sentenced for collecting pay for time he didn’t work
A former Alorton police officer, who had pleaded guilty in federal court to collecting approximately $60,000 in fraudulent pay by lying about the time he was on duty, was sentenced in a U. S. district court on Wednesday.
Ricky Perry, 51, who also was previously employed by the East St. Louis Police Department, was ordered to serve five months in a federal prison and another five months of supervised release. He admitted in the U.S. District Court for Southern Illinois last September to falsifying time cards between May 2018 and April of 2021.
In April, FBI agents served a federal search warrant at Alorton City Hall and removed boxes of personal records. According to court records, agents compared Perry’s time cards with GPS records on the patrol cars he used after clocking in for duty. They identified approximately 4,000 hours of conflicting time where Perry traveled outside the Alorton jurisdiction, usually to go to his East St. Louis home.
According to court records, he parked his patrol car outside his house and sometimes ignored calls from dispatchers, even if he was the only officer on duty.
Embezzling money from a unit of government that receives federal funds may carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Before being consolidated into the new Cahokia Heights, the Village of Alorton received federal funding, including more than $82,000 in Coronavirus Relief Funds.
Perry was hired as a patrol officer in Alorton in August of 2017.
Following Perry’s arraignment, Steven Weinhoeft, U.S. Attorney for Southern Illinois, called the former village “a high crime area that is served by very dedicated police officers.” He said Perry violated a public trust, but that his crime should not detract from the confidence in and the important work of police officers as a whole.
“The overwhelming majority of police officers are honorable public servants who place their lives in harm’s way to protect the rest of us,” he said in a written statement Wednesday. “But there must be consequences for those rare situations when officers break the laws they swore to uphold. We will continue to enforce the law in an evenhanded way against all who break it.”
The investigation was conducted by the Southern Illinois Public Corruption Task Force which is made up of FBI and Illinois State Police agents.
