Chicago City Wire

In what one criminal justice scholar called “absolute craziness,” a Cook County judge last week eased bail conditions from an ankle monitor to a nighttime curfew for a woman who nearly killed a police officer last June.

“It’s not just in Chicago, it’s happening everywhere,” Joseph Giacalone, adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the former commanding officer of the NYPD’s Bronx Cold Case Squad, told Chicago City Wire. “Imagine if these are the bail conditions they get for assaulting a police officer the message it sends about assaulting an ordinary citizen.”

According to reports, in the incident that began in West Garfield Park, a naked Whitley Temple, 34, fired a gun at bystanders on the street, stole a patrol car, backing over an officer in the process, then crashed the car into multiple vehicles.

Temple was arrested on a half dozen charges including attempted murder of a peace officer, aggravated battery, and vehicular hijacking.

The officer, Ed Poppish, 47, required six stiches on the back of his head, suffered bruising on his legs, missed three months of work and entered a traumatic incident management program.

Reacting to the eased bail conditions, Dan Quaid, Trustee for the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and candidate for First Vice President for the FOP, told Chicago City Wire that “too often in Chicago criminals are not being held accountable for what they do.”

“If you're going to support law enforcement you have to have officers in cases in which they get injured held accountable,” Quaid said.

Temple’s defense attorney  at the time, Javaron Buckley, claimed his client had been the victim of a sexual assault just before the incident.

“She got into the car to escape the circumstances she was facing,” he was quoted in a WTTW report as saying. He did not elaborate.

In August, Buckley found himself on the wrong side of the law when he pleaded guilty in McHenry County to one count of contributing liquor to a minor, and one count of renting a hotel room for liquor consumption by a minor. He was sentenced to 30 days in the county jail.

Giacalone said that cases like Whitley’s are the reasons that police develop an apathetic attitude toward fighting crime.

“We’re going back to what crime was like in the 80s and 90s,” he said, “with policing getting reactive instead of proactive.”

“Voters have to wake up and realize what are terrible mistake that progressives are making with the law, or else we’re going to end up with ghost towns.”