At one point I was told to turn off my vehicle, which I immediately did, but just moving my hand off the steering wheel and down to the key made my heart skip a beat. I tried to remain calm, but with that many armed men surrounding me, some with weapons drawn and pointed squarely at me, I did not feel very safe. I pleaded for the men to bring in a supervisor.

As I became more terrified, they became more enraged. This exchange was repeated a few times, and with each iteration, I became more fearful and suspicious that something very wrong was happening (why would police officers refuse to identify themselves?). The officer would not identify himself or explain anything. I found this rather disconcerting, so I asked him to identify himself and again asked why I had been stopped. The officer just repeated that I needed to get out of the car. This seemed rather abrupt and unusual, and I asked why I had been pulled over. The first officer that approached immediately started ordering me out of the car. Within one minute there were at least 9 vehicles with flashing lights on all sides of my stopped vehicle.Īs soon as I stopped, I rolled my window down approximately 3 inches so I could talk to them and give them my ID, and I put my hands visibly on the steering wheel. One of the cars pulled up onto the sidewalk/grass to my right, and two more cars showed up almost immediately after. Multiple unmarked cars lined up behind me and simultaneously turned on their emergency lights to pull me over. I was driving normally and had not broken any traffic laws, so the stop was a mystery to me. On August 22nd 2015 I was driving home from the downtown Champaign area when I was pulled over by Champaign Police next to the AM-KO parking lot at Springfield and 1st.

To my knowledge, none of the problems raised in this story have been rectified in any way. Warnings about citizen oversight and the actions of those public bodies were ignored, and multiple preventable deaths followed thereafter. The same public entities mentioned denied the fulfillment of FOIA requests, and an inattentive Attorney General upheld those denials. This person concealed the truth, and her actions put a completely innocent person in jail, destroying his reputation. This saga involves a corrupt, violent, and incompetent police force, a savage and malignant county jail, willfully negligent news agencies, and a downright malicious close friend of the past Mayor of Champaign. I am writing this as an open letter to anyone who might find it concerning that a simple visit to downtown Champaign might turn into a multi-year long, depression-inducing nightmare. I am a UIUC College of Engineering graduate and 16 year resident of Urbana, IL. Corruption and Incompetence in Champaign County

The Breaking Light by Heather Hansen