Racist Cop Brutally Arrests Black Judge While She Parks Her Car — Now It’s Costing the City $820K

The Six Words That Cost a City Nearly a Million Dollars

It is a damning indictment of American policing that a badge can so easily become a shield for incompetence and prejudice. Officer Matthew Klene of the Crest Hill Police Department proved exactly how expensive that shield can become when he decided to arrest a woman in her own driveway. His declaration, “I don’t care who you are,” captured on a neighbor’s Ring camera, wasn’t just a moment of arrogance; it was the epitaph of his career and a $820,000 lesson for a city that had spent years ignoring the rot within its own ranks.

Officer Klene was not a rogue anomaly; he was a protected liability. For nine years, he patrolled with a personnel file that screamed “lawsuit waiting to happen.” He had accumulated seven internal complaints: four for excessive use of force and three for racial profiling. In any functioning private sector job, a record like that results in termination. In the Crest Hill Police Department, it resulted in euphemisms. Supervisors described him as “proactive” and “detail-oriented,” code words used to sanitize the behavior of an officer who targeted Black and brown citizens with aggressive, escalating tactics. The department had every opportunity to intervene, yet every complaint was dismissed, and every red flag was buried under the guise of “effective enforcement.”

The target of Klene’s unchecked ego on that Tuesday afternoon was Judge Vanessa Porter. She was not a suspect; she was a homeowner returning from a day of presiding over the state appellate bench. She was a woman who had clawed her way to the top of the legal profession, a Harvard Law graduate, and a former prosecutor known for her fairness. None of that mattered to Klene. He saw a Black woman driving a BMW in an affluent neighborhood and decided, without a shred of evidence, that she did not belong. He didn’t run her plates. He didn’t check property records. He simply let his bias take the wheel, blocking her driveway and escalating a non-event into a civil rights violation before she had even put her car in park.

The interaction itself was a masterclass in failure. Klene demanded she exit the vehicle without cause, refused to look at her credentials, and physically assaulted a 52-year-old woman who was calmly identifying herself. He twisted the arm of a sitting judge, slammed her against the hood of her car, and handcuffed her while she was barefoot, all because his fragile authority could not abide a Black woman asserting her rights in her own home. He treated her assertions of “I live here” not as facts to be verified, but as resistance to be crushed.

The aftermath exposed the cowardice of the department’s leadership. It took the arrest of a politically powerful judge to force the city to look at a pattern it had ignored for a decade. Discovery in the subsequent lawsuit revealed that 14 months prior to this incident, the department’s own risk management team had recommended Klene be retrained due to his disproportionate stopping of Black drivers. That memo was read and ignored because leadership didn’t want to fight the police union. They chose political expediency over public safety, and Judge Porter paid the price for their cowardice.

The $820,000 settlement is not justice; it is a penalty tax paid by the taxpayers for the city’s negligence. While Klene was eventually fired and his name added to the National Decertification Index, the reality remains that if Vanessa Porter had been a nurse, a teacher, or a clerk instead of a judge, Klene would likely still be on the street. The system didn’t work because it holds officers accountable; it worked because it got caught targeting someone with the power to fight back. The apology issued by the chief and the new oversight boards are merely reactive band-aids on a gaping wound of systemic bias. Until departments stop coddling officers with histories of racial profiling and excessive force, “I don’t care who you are” will remain the unofficial motto of bad policing everywhere.