JOLIET, IL — Brittany Drabek, a 25-year-old woman from Crystal Lake, received a stern lecture from a Joliet police officer after her February arrest at a Joliet house in the 1300 block of Kinsey Avenue because she put up a fight with the two officers who tried to arrest her in connection with a stolen car Drabek had in her Joliet garage.
Joliet Patch has obtained the body camera video from the Joliet police officers through a Freedom of Information Act request. Drabek was subsequently given her notice to appear on charges of possession of a stolen vehicle and aggravated resisting a peace officer.
“If you would have did that in the beginning instead of acting all scary and cracking the door, I promise you, none of this would have happened,” one of the arresting officers told her back inside his Joliet police squad car. “It would have never went this far. Your fault for doing that. Not ours. You acted like we walked up as we were robbers or something like that. We have on full police uniform. Ma’am, what were you thinking?
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“You’re like 25 or 26 years old. Why would we come in and rob your house? We’re in full uniform. Okay, these are the results of your actions, not ours.”
In the garage, she was hiding a stolen car that she had taken from a relative, according to arrest reports.
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You can watch the entire video of Drabek’s arrest at the bottom of this story.
At the 13-minute mark, the two Joliet officers take her into custody after she had spent several minutes refusing to open her front door or step outside to talk with them.
“Wait! Wait! What the f***? What the hell?” Drabek screams as she’s being arrested.
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“Put your hands behind your back,” a Joliet police officer orders her.
“Why?” Drabek cries. “Wait, why? Why? Why? Why? … What the F***?”
“Stop moving!” an officer told Drabek as he’s struggling to put her in handcuffs.
When the officer told her she’s also being charged with aggravated resisting arrest, Drabek pleads, “Wait, I just got scared. I was cooperating … Please, please, please don’t charge me with the second one.”
At the 16:50 mark of the Joliet police body camera video, Drabek is put into the back seat of the Joliet police car as she cries, “I didn’t mean to do this.”
Around the 18:30 mark, the arresting officer advised her, “Well, you had all this time to contact (name redacted from video) and you didn’t.”
“I tried to,” Drabek claims. “Can I just explain that to her?”
At 20:57, the officer tells her, “This wasn’t our original report. It was Kendall County, I believe. And you would not even open the door. We didn’t even know what was going on right now. We knew that you were missing, and we knew that (words redacted from video) was reported stolen. We’ll talk to you more when we get down to the station.”
Around the 23:20 mark, Drabek is informed that she ripped a fingernail of Officer Lesly Sigala as she fought with the Joliet officers during her arrest.
“I’m sorry. I just got scared,” Drabek pleaded. “I didn’t mean to.”
At the 25:30 mark, the arresting officer told Drabek, “No, what you should have did in the beginning is open the door. We’re police officers. I don’t know why you were acting all scared. We’re police officers. You shouldn’t have cracked the door. You should have opened it fully and stepped outside and talked to us until we figured out what we had.”
Original Joliet Patch story:
Stolen Car Found In Joliet As Missing Woman Resists Her Arrest: JPD
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