In her DUI arrest, a Cook County politician told Chicago cops, ‘I’m an elected official.’
During her arrest for DUI in Chicago earlier this month, a Democratic member of the obscure but influential Cook County Board of Review made sure that cops at the scene of a crash she caused knew they were dealing with a politician.
In police body-camera videos from the incident in Andersonville on Nov. 11 that WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times obtained this week, Board of Review Commissioner Samantha Steele repeatedly refused to cooperate with officers who responded, including requests from cops to get out of the smashed car she was driving.
One officer told her, “Ma’am, if you don’t exit the vehicle … I’m going to help you to exit, and you don’t want that.”
“You don’t want that! I’m an elected official,” Steele shot back.
“Elected official of what?” the officer asked.
“Cook County,” Steele told him.
When the officer asked for her name, Steele held out her hand and said, “I’m Sam.”
The cop replied, “Sam who?” But Steele did not give the police her full name at that point.
The officer told other cops, “She’s saying she’s an elected official of Cook County.” Steele then said, “I don’t want to be on the video.”
But police told her she was indeed on video and they continued to record the interaction with Steele.
Despite several requests, Steele would not initially provide officers with her driver’s license or get out of the car. Sitting in the driver’s seat, she drank from what seemed to be a water bottle and used her cellphone to call the person she described many times as her attorney — Democratic Cook County Commissioner Scott Britton of Glenview.
She only gave her driver’s license to police and exited the car after Britton advised her over the phone to do so.
After Britton arrived at the scene in the 5000 block of North Ashland Avenue, Steele said she was not drinking the wine from the bottle in the car. Britton interjected: “Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.”
Two days after the arrest, Britton said he was not a defense attorney and would not be representing Steele in her case. Britton said Steele had an attorney but he would not identify the lawyer.
The three-member Board of Review has the power to rule on property tax appeals, effectively reducing tax bills. Steele lives in Evanston, and she represents the Board of Review’s district covering much of the North Side of Chicago and northern suburbs.
The video from her arrest also shows the moment when police searched the car Steele was driving and discovered what records indicate was a half-empty bottle of red wine near the front passenger seat. In the video, officers joke that the cabernet sauvignon was “good stuff” and that breath mints they also found “didn’t help” — an apparent reference to the strong smell of alcohol that officers allege they detected on Steele’s breath.
After at first refusing to do a field sobriety test, Steele agreed to do it, but then Steele said she had hit her head in the crash and wanted to take an ambulance to be treated. She was handcuffed again and placed in an ambulance, which took her to the hospital, according to police reports.
Steele soon was transported to Chicago’s Lincoln police district, where she allegedly made lewd comments to an officer, records show. The cop wrote in his report that Steele “repeatedly said, ‘Is your penis that small’ ” to him.
But the newly released video does not include Steele making those comments, which allegedly were said at the hospital. None of these recordings include footage from the hospital.
Police charged Steele with one misdemeanor count of driving under the influence of alcohol. She has not commented publicly on the case. Her court date is Dec. 27, records show.
The next Board of Review meeting is scheduled for Dec. 2. Steele, 45, was first elected to the Board of Review in 2022, after being an elected county official in Indiana.
The Democrat and her chief of staff are facing a federal whistleblower lawsuit filed recently by former aide Frank Calabrese, who obtained the body-camera footage of the arrest through an open-records request to police and shared it with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Earlier in the year, Steele defended giving a job at the Board of Review to a former northwest Indiana politician who had pleaded guilty in a federal case.
And she also has found herself at the center of the high-stakes dispute over the Chicago Bears’ property tax bill for the old Arlington Park racecourse property, where the football team has considered building a new stadium.
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team. Tom Schuba is a criminal justice editor for the Sun-Times.