Whipped Cream Difficulties

Hey, remember Maywood? The city that couldn’t get insurance, and had to disband the police department and much of the municipal government, in large part because the cops were out of control? That Maywood?

Well, cops are going to be cops, right? And if they aren’t cops in Maywood, they’ve got to end up somewhere, right?

Guess where they ended up.

If you said “I bet they ended up with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department”, you get to drink from the firehose.

Should being employed by Maywood be a bar to signing on with LACSD? Given the level of misconduct and corruption in that department, I think a case can be made that yes, former Maywood officers should not be employed in law enforcement anywhere. But let us set aside the generalities for the moment and focus on specifics. Some of the former Maywood officers hired by LACSD included:

• one who got drunk at a friend’s house, left and shot at the house with his duty gun, was stopped by police and denied any knowledge of shots being fired, and was ultimately convicted of “a misdemeanor of discharging a firearm”.
• Another one who was actually being investigated by Maywood for perjury, “a probe that was never concluded because the agency had disbanded”.
  

  A court had found that the officer had “deliberately and calculatedly” testified on the stand about information that had been suppressed, according to the report. In another instance, that officer was accused of trying to hit a police commissioner with his car, then threatening several others involved with the commission. According to the report, the investigation into the incident was not thorough.

• A third who was fired from one department for “dishonesty”.

There were apparently four “questionable” applicants from Maywood hired (the article does not mention why number four was considered questionable) out of an unknown number of applicants from Maywood. As a reminder:

At least a third of the then-37 member force had left other police jobs under a cloud or had brushes with the law while working for Maywood.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2012 at 10:37 am and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.