580 Illinois officers with credibility issues testified in court at least 1,700 times

A new database compiled by the Invisible Institute identifies more than 580 active Illinois law enforcement officers with documented credibility issues. These officers have made hundreds of arrests and were subpoenaed to testify in court at least 1,700 times. The figures are likely undercounts, as many prosecutors and police departments do not track when officers are subpoenaed.

The data comes from Brady records requested from more than 100 prosecutors' offices statewide. The Brady system requires prosecutors to disclose evidence that could undermine a witness's credibility, based on the U.S. Supreme Court cases Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States. The Invisible Institute found that county prosecutors often seemed unaware of officers with histories of dishonesty, bias, or misconduct, allowing those officers to testify without the required disclosures to the defense.

Anthony Kendrick, a deputy with the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office, serves as a primary example of this gap. For the past 20 years, Kendrick has worked in police departments and sheriff's offices in Williamson, Jackson, Hardin, and Massac counties. He has accumulated at least six excessive-force lawsuits for allegedly beating residents. In 2024, Douglas Dyhrkopp, the state's attorney for Gallatin County, began receiving complaints that Kendrick might be a problematic witness. Dyhrkopp told the Invisible Institute, "Some folks did not like some things that were going on with some things that he was investigating."

Dyhrkopp discovered appellate court records showing Kendrick had testified falsely under oath more than a decade earlier. He immediately notified the county's public defender, a constitutional obligation for prosecutors. "Clearly, I was surprised by this," Dyhrkopp wrote in his letter to the public defender. Kendrick, who declined to comment, has served as a sheriff's deputy in Gallatin County for almost two years.

The database includes other officers with specific histories of misconduct. William Wichern, a veteran Illinois Department of Natural Resources officer, repeatedly made racist, homophobic, and sexist statements to colleagues. Crestwood police officer Arthur Roman was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison for assaulting two teens. Rockford police officers Emilio Marquez and Owen McGuinness allegedly beat a man and fractured his rib while he was handcuffed and facedown on the ground. Wichern, Roman, Marquez, and McGuinness did not respond to requests for comment.

Keith Grant, a supervising attorney for the Lake County public defender's office and head of the Illinois Public Defender Association, said the public data will help defenders track officer histories. Grant noted that while public defenders request police personnel files "all the time" in discovery, courts sometimes block these requests without evidence of prior misconduct. He added that when prosecutors flag an officer, "there's probably some digging that needs to be done."

In Cook County, former state's attorney Kim Foxx built two Brady lists despite opposition from the local Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7. In 2025, her successor, Eileen O'Neill Burke, moved to eliminate Foxx's public-facing "Do Not Call" list and the office's private disclosure list in favor of an internal drive. Foxx, who worked as an assistant state's attorney in Cook County for 12 years before her 2016 election, said she was never trained on her duty to disclose. "Part of what you are seeing is, I think, a presumption that offices know what those obligations and responsibilities are and a presumption that folks are being trained around it," she said.

Adam Gershowitz, a William & Mary Law School professor, said police officers have little incentive to flag their own misconduct. "If police have engaged in misconduct themselves, they're not in the business of advertising that," he said. He noted that it is difficult for prosecutors to know about all misconduct unless the county has a procedure to share information effectively. Lake County state's attorney Eric Rinehart supports a statewide, centralized Brady list to improve transparency between offices. "A statewide, centralized Brady list shared between prosecutor offices would greatly improve transparency," Rinehart said in a statement.