Others can debate whether Robert Ellis is a real police officer, but there is a growing body of evidence showing that he is quite an able lawyer.
On Tuesday, a judge found the 67-year-old Ellis not guilty on charges that in 2021 he impersonated a Pembroke Township police officer. The rural community of 2,000 people in Kankakee County doesn’t have an official police department.
Last year, Ellis was able to get the same judge to throw out key evidence on charges he also falsely identified himself as a Pembroke officer in 2018, prompting prosecutors to drop the case.
In acquitting Ellis, Cook County Judge Carol Howard on Tuesday found that even though Ellis said he was a police officer, he wasn’t lying. He had been duly appointed by Pembroke Township officials, even though the community of some 2,000 people had not put officers through full police training, had no police station, no squad cars, and no budget to pay much of anything.
Ellis was arrested in 2021 after a White Sox game when police noticed his car parked on a section of South Shields Avenue near the ballpark reserved for police officers.
When confronted by a Chicago police officer as he walked toward his car, Ellis allegedly said he was a police commissioner in Pembroke Township. Officers at the scene checked an online database and could find no record of Ellis, then called the Kankakee County sheriff’s office and were told Pembroke had no police department.
Ellis, who also took the stand, called two Pembroke Township board members as defense witnesses, and they testified that the board voted to launch a police force in 2018 and appointed Ellis police commissioner. The poor community had seen a rise in shootings and “cartel” activity at the time, Ellis said.
Howard noted, however, that a letter from the state Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, which certifies police officers, said the township could appoint “police officers,” though the officers would not have full police powers and could do little more than write tickets.
“Nowhere in the letter does the [board] indicate that Pembroke Township could not refer to the officers it appointed as police officers,” Howard said after deliberating for about 30 minutes on her verdict.
The Pembroke officers “just would just have very limited powers and duties.”
Ellis has prior convictions for arson and impersonating an officer from the 1990s, when he formed a police agency tied to a “railroad” company he incorporated with a short length of narrow-gauge track and a lone, small locomotive.
Ellis was carrying a badge for the Beta U.S. Railroad Police when he was arrested outside Sox Park, though he noted repeatedly during questioning by police that the Beta railroad ID badge he had on him indicated that he was retired.
Ellis still faces charges of allegedly misrepresenting himself as a police officer later in 2021, when he attempted to get new license plates for the car that he had driven to the Sox game.
As he left the Leighton Criminal Courthouse on Tuesday night, Ellis was not concerned, casting his decades-long battle to carry a badge as a struggle against racist law enforcement agencies that don’t want to see Black police.
“I’m never wrong about anything,” Ellis said. “I’ve never impersonated anybody. I’ve never not followed the law.
“This is what this is all about in a nutshell: We say we’re going to [form a police department] and they say, ‘We don’t care what the law says, we’re not going to let you.’”