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Over a four-year period starting in 2020, he ran more than 1,000 names through the Regional Justice Information System (REJIS), a criminal database used by most law enforcement agencies in the St. Louis region. It tracks all sorts of personal information, from criminal histories to driver’s license details and vehicle registration information.

It’s a misdemeanor for a police officer to use REJIS without a proper law enforcement purpose, and former Chief Doug Schaeffler’s fellow Ballwin officers determined that hundreds of his searches were “very questionable.� Schaeffler, who has sued over his December 2023 firing, faces a possible criminal investigation into his use of REJIS.

Now the city of Ballwin is facing a reckoning of its own.

Clayton attorney filed a class-action lawsuit Friday against the city and its former police chief, seeking financial recompense for the hundreds of residents who may have had their privacy rights violated. Neither Ballwin nor Schaeffler have yet responded to the lawsuit.

The “improper use of REJIS and government criminal background data to search citizens, without any probable cause, and not pursuant to law enforcement purposes, is an unreasonable means to gain access to citizens’ secret subject matter and private facts,� the lawsuit says.

The suit alleges violations of Missouri constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as invasion of privacy and negligence.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is Kevin Roach, a former alderman in Ballwin. Of all the known names of people searched, Roach’s is perhaps most problematic when it comes to potential invasion of privacy. Roach is enrolled in Missouri’s Safe at Home program, which protects home addresses of people who have been victims of domestic violence, assault or stalking. It also protects the addresses of their family members.

According to public documents, members of the program — there are more than 2,000 people in it at any given time — use the same post office box at the Secretary of State’s office. The program has their address and gets the mail to them.

Roach’s name was run through REJIS by Schaeffler on the same day — Jan. 24, 2022 — that Ballwin city attorney Robert Jones was researching the Safe at Home program. Roach was a frequent critic of the mayor.

Whether city officials had anything to do with Schaeffler searching Roach’s name, or any other residents, is not known. But Pedroli’s lawsuit claims that Schaeffler could not have acted alone and conducted many searches “at the request of other Ballwin officials.�

Schaeffler “and agents of Ballwin, acting alone and in concert with one another, conducted improper searches on more than one hundred and fifty people, without probable cause or without relation to law enforcement purposes,� the suit says. The folks searched included those “who lived or worked in Ballwin or merely spoke at a Ballwin public meeting.�

The name of one Ballwin resident, Matthew Conlon, was searched a few days after he complained at a Board of Aldermen meeting about an incident in which Jones and Mayor Tim Pogue conspired to kick an aldermanic candidate off the ballot. Another resident, Mike Scott, was searched after he emailed two aldermen to ask about privacy rights.

Such actions show that Ballwin officials believe they’re above the law, Pedroli says. He hopes his lawsuit — along with a separate, ongoing open records lawsuit — will shine a light on abuses of the REJIS system that may occur in other municipalities.

“Americans have a fundamental right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This is a core and definitively bipartisan American value,� Pedroli said in an interview. “Ballwin is an outrageous and chilling example of government conducting illegal searches of Americans for the crime of living in Ballwin, working in Ballwin, or merely participating in democracy.�