Police in CA accused of wrongdoing find jobs with other police departments; is this a national trend?
In Maywood,CA as elsewhere, the economic crash has choked off the tax revenue on which the municipal government subsists. The town is currently facing a $450,000 deficit. But what finally broke the city, reports the Los Angeles Times, was the decision by the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority to terminate “general liability and workers’ compensation coverage because the city posed too high a risk.”
More specifically, the city was un-insurable because of “a large number of claims filed against the police.” This is because the department (which also afflicted a neighboring town called Cudahy) had become the police equivalent of The Island of Misfit Toys – a sanctuary city for criminals in state-issued costumes…
“The Maywood Police Department has the reputation for being an `agency of last resort’ for those who seek employment as a peace officer,” explained a March 2009 report compiled by the California Attorney General’s Office. “Review of the Maywood Police Department’s hiring practices over the past ten years validates this perception.”
The April 2007 investigative report by the Los Angeles Times found that at least one-third of Maywood’s officers “had either left other police jobs under a cloud or had brushes with the law while working for Maywood.” The department was a full-spectrum kakistocracy: In February 2008, the city council selected as Police Chief an individual named Al Hutchings, who had been convicted of theft and forced to resign from the LAPD. (The man Hutchings replaced had been convicted of domestic abuse while serving as Police Chief.)
Links: http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w154.html
http://www.copblock.org/