Detroit,MI : Police discuss break for prosecutor in crash on September, Wednesday 13th 2017

Recordings released Wednesday reveal three western Michigan police officers discussing giving an apparently intoxicated assistant prosecutor a break after a traffic crash in which one person was injured.

The recordings were made inadvertently as Grand Rapids police investigated the traffic crash involving then-Assistant Kent County Prosecutor Josh Kuiper, who allegedly drove the wrong way down a one-way street before crashing into a parked car, injuring a man. On the recordings, Officer Adam Ickes tells his supervisor, then-Lt. Matthew Janiskee, during a phone call that Kuiper appears intoxicated and that he had admitted that he had been drinking. But Kuiper was not asked to take a breathalyzer test for alcohol and was not charged with drunken driving.

The recordings of five phone calls from November 2016 were released to the MLive Media Group following a court battle, the Grand Rapids city manager’s office said.

Ickes is heard telling Janiskee, “I got Josh Kuiper from the prosecutor’s office — wrong way — visibly intox … as I approached, driving the wrong way and struck a parked car. There was a guy getting into the car at the time who got knocked to the ground — not sure on injuries at this point.”

Janiskee responds, “Can we do sobriety and go from there? Let’s pass him if we can. If we can’t, we can’t. I’d like to pass him on sobriety,” referring to a field sobriety test in which an officer asks a motorist to perform a set of tasks that are difficult to perform when drunk.


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Police discuss break for prosecutor in crash