Hobart Police officer Michael Gallagher is staring down a Level 5 felony battery charge and a misdemeanor OWI after a drunken, bloody porch brawl — and he should be. Nobody in a badge gets a pass for beating up his friend's daughter's boyfriend so badly the man left with a concussion and chunks of his hair ripped out.
But spare a thought for the double standard on display. Gallagher will feel the full weight of the criminal justice system because he is an enforcer of it — not a writer of the laws. The people who actually write the rules, fund the failures, and shield themselves behind sovereign immunity? They never seem to end up in the dock.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Gallagher, 38, and his girlfriend Taylor Barham were drinking at bars and a liquor store the night of Aug. 14 before the group returned to a friend's Hobart home, which still had no power days after a derecho. When the friend's son showed up, got upset, and left — texting he wanted to "go 100 mph and hit a wall," which he later told police was just "venting" — the friend told Gallagher and Barham the night was "over" and tried to kick them out.
The friend's daughter arrived to check on her brother and also told the couple to leave. Gallagher, a.k.a. "Mikey," responded she didn't live there. The argument spiraled. The daughter's boyfriend ended up with a concussion, his hair pulled out, and a bitten thumb. The daughter had a bitten arm, scrapes, and a sore face. Both went to the hospital.
Gallagher and Barham fled before police arrived, according to the affidavit, then got pulled over in a golf cart near Front and Center Streets. Officers noted Gallagher's hands were bleeding, his face was scraped, his speech was "slurred," and he smelled like alcohol. He posted a $2,500 cash bond. Hobart Police Chief Garrett Ciszewski requested the Board of Public Works place him on unpaid administrative leave pending the case's outcome.
Good. That is how accountability is supposed to work. An officer broke the law; his department acted; prosecutors charged him.
Now ask yourself: when was the last time a bureaucrat who bankrupted a city, a politician who lied a country into debt, or an agency official whose incompetence got Americans killed faced a felony charge and an unpaid suspension? The two-tiered justice system everyone talks about isn't just about race. It's about power. The enforcers face the law. The architects of the law hide behind it.
Gallagher will have his day in court — as he should. The open question is whether the people who write the laws that ordinary Americans live under will ever have theirs.
