BRING YOUR CHILD TO WORK....ON STEROIDS

Patrick Zaruba has one cool dad. As a seventeen year old high school student, young Patrick got to enjoy the Take Your Child to Work program in a very special way. His father happens to be John Zaruba, DuPage County Sheriff. Young Patrick just didn't get to sit in his father's office and watch him turn the wheels of criminal justice. He got to ride with deputies pursuing bad guys and even was recorded on a police car camera chasing after a bad guy himself. Wow! Not content with persusing a single bad guy, young Patrick was given access to Law Enforcement Agencies Data Systems (LEADS) which contains the record of every single licensed driver in Illinois.

Now the Better Government Association (BGA) has filed a lawsuit to force Sheriff Zaruba to release information regarding what records young Patrick may have accessed and for what purposes. BGA President Andy Shaw argues: "There's no one in America who could possibly defend letting a teenager into a confidential law enforcement database with power to play around like its a video game, only with peoples' lives." No one that is, except DuPage County Sheriff John Zaruba.

Also published in the Daily Herald, July 12, 2012