* 2023…

An Illinois State Police trooper is “Illinois’ Top Cop” making 145 DUI arrests in 2022, according to the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists.

The report released Thursday provides DUI arrest data for various police agencies statewide. AAIM has conducted the annual surveys for 33 years with taxpayer-funded grants from the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Topping individual law enforcement officers, Illinois State Police Trooper Kevin Bradley was listed as Illinois’ Top Cop. Bradley had 145 DUI arrests in 2022.

* ABC 7 a couple of weeks ago…

For several years, an Illinois State Police Trooper was named by a nonprofit the “Top Cop”: a moniker given to the member of law enforcement who has made the most DUI arrests in a single year statewide.

But many of those arrested drivers tell the ABC7 I-Team they were sober, and in some cases, it took years to clear their names of serious criminal charges.

A driver from Wisconsin says he owned his own trucking company but had to shut it down after losing his commercial driving license following a DUI arrest by the state trooper. Nearly two years later, the charges against him were ultimately dismissed, and he’s since filed a lawsuit. […]

After reviewing more than 300 DUI prosecutions listing Trooper Bradley as the arresting officer since 2023, the I-Team found 174 drivers were found not guilty at trial, or their cases were dismissed before adjudication, like in Ian Renfro’s case.

According to court records, 105 drivers were found guilty, with 96 of those drivers accepting plea deals for lesser charges. As of last month, 40 cases are still pending.

* May 7…

A restaurant executive arrested by an Illinois State Police trooper on DUI charges told the ABC 7 I-Team when he discovered his MacBook was missing from his car, he tracked it to the house of the trooper who arrested him.

What followed was captured in a 911 call recording, a cell phone video, and an internal investigation by the Illinois State Police, all obtained by the I-Team. […]

The son of a Chicago police officer, Holland says he was the designated driver for a co-worker after working overnight when he was pulled over by Trooper Bradley. […]

Bradley then asked Holland to “relocate” by driving down the road to a gas station in Worth Township, passing through several intersections and traffic lights. […]

Later that day, when Holland needed his MacBook, he said he noticed it wasn’t listed on his inventory slip, so he assumed it must be with his car at the tow yard.

“I decided to ping my MacBook,” Holland told the I-Team, “and it pinged to an address.”

Using Apple’s “Find My” feature, Holland says his MacBook was not pinging at the tow yard with his car, rather it was showing up at a Tinley Park home.

“I was fearful of going to retrieve my item,” Holland explained. “And I just had to motivate myself and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go get it.’”

Holland says he found his courage, and drove over to the address, where after knocking on the front door, he was eventually met by Trooper Bradley.

* May 14…

In cases where field sobriety tests were performed, the attorneys found the results were the same across nearly the entire board among Bradley’s arrests.

“They [the tests] just didn’t come back in a way that was scientifically plausible,” Segal said. “If someone’s conducting a test 463 times, and in 462 of them, the individual has not only failed, but shown all six clues… It’s not like there’s a normal distribution, where some people show zero, few more show one. The most is three, kind of a bell curve.”

Segal continued, “With Trooper Bradley’s scientific results, you just see one column to the max and another and all the other columns basically blank.”

In addition, Segal and Sansonetti told the I-Team they discovered what they considered a “smoking gun.”

“We actually came across what we consider a smoking gun, which was a full field report, which was copy and pasted verbatim from one arrestee to another arrestee,” Segal said. “And that was shocking.”

The field reports were for two DUI arrests that occurred in March 2022. In the first arrest, according to the report, a driver was arrested for DUI on March 20, 2022, after telling Bradley they were taking the medication Lexapro. More than 24 hours later, according to a separate report, Bradley arrested another driver for DUI but the narrative section of the report appears to be copied word for word, including the first driver’s name and details from the prior night.

“The reports were 100% verbatim,” Sansonetti said. “It included the wrong person’s name. The first person who was arrested, Trooper Bradley had written his name wrong, and that same typo was in the second report. So that was startling to me.”

According to court records, in both cases, DUI charges were dismissed by prosecutors.

* Also…

The attorneys believe there’s a connection between the number of arrests made by Trooper Bradley, and the amount of overtime he has earned through court appearances.

As the I-Team previously reported, Bradley tripled his salary in 2024, earning nearly $250,000 in a single year.

“As his DUI totals went up, year after year after year, so did his salary,” Segal said. “[Troopers] make overtime pay for just showing up at court. So even if they show up at court, they testify and the case is garbage and they lose, the trooper still gets paid.”

I reached out to the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists a week ago Friday. I have not yet heard back.