About two years ago, we noted that there must be something questionable in the water in Cleveland, Tenn., because the police department there had so many scandals.
Clearly, however, law enforcement problems must extend to Bradley County as well.
Scrutiny of finances in the Bradley County Sheriff's Office got a boost this week when Bradley County commissioners voted to move forward with a forensic audit to take a closer look at the department's surplus property disposal.
The county's five-member Finance Committee unanimously approved Commissioner Thomas Crye's motion to form an ad hoc committee to define the audit's scope and cost. Unlike the county's regular annual audit, a forensic audit would look specifically for evidence of financial wrongdoing.
Bradley County Sheriff Eric Watson in his booking photograph following his July indictment on charges of six felony counts of owning or using certificates of title that had been forged or altered.Committee members never mentioned the sheriff's office, but Mayor D. Gary Davis said, "I think everybody knows what the intent is."
Sheriff Eric Watson was indicted in July on six felony counts of owning or using certificates of title that had been forged or altered. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. He also faces a formal complaint of jail bullying. He remains in office.
But persistent allegations of credit card misuse, missing money and other problems in the Bradley County Sheriff's Office have led to an investigation by the Tennessee Department of Investigation that is now in its 14th month. Separately, the Tennessee Department of Revenue and the Department of Commerce and Insurance investigated after the Times Free Press published a series looking at Watson's second business as a used car salesman. Those probes are what prompted the indictment.
It would seem that the commission is painstakingly looking for cover either to fire or retain this sheriff who clearly isn't of a mind to step down on his own, despite controversy after controversy - like the one created in early 2016 when Watson sold off the county's $130,000 surveillance van for $20,000 to a Nashville bail bondsman.
(Did we mention that his wife is a bail bondsman who reportedly receives a disproportionate number of Bradley County jail bonds and gets help from her husband to reel in bond jumpers?)
Watson said the county surveillance van and its equipment were outmoded and obsolete, but department paperwork showed it recently had been renovated and upgraded. Commissioners also found last year that Watson had sold off some vehicles and other property as surplus without commission authorization.
Just this week, the full commission delayed an authorization for the sheriff's office to dispose of 11 other vehicles and a boat as surplus property.
But those questions just continue a long Bradley County history of questionable law enforcement activity.
In January, a former Cleveland police officer was sentenced to state prison for three years for helping a friend commit insurance fraud. The officer faces separate charges related to the torching of his own car for insurance purposes in May 2015.
In 2015, two Cleveland officers were fired after a probe of allegations that they had extramarital sex with women they met on duty and one woman accused an officer of sexual assault at a rented cabin in Gatlinburg.
A few months before that, two other officers were demoted and reassigned for policy violations related to the investigation of ex-chief Dennis Maddu's affair with the wife of one of those officers. The officer had found his wife and the chief trysting in a car just over the county line in Calhoun, Tenn.
In January 2014, longtime Cleveland Police Chief Wes Snyder retired after surveillance video showed him meeting a woman at a storage unit fitted out with a rug, blankets and brandy.
And in the summer of 2013, an officer was suspended and later resigned over a third allegation of sexual misconduct since he joined the department in 2004. The woman sued him in federal court.
Also in 2013, a police sergeant was terminated for repeated policy violations after suggestive texts and explicit photos from him turned up on the phone of a high-dollar prostitute whose death by gunshot was ruled a suicide.
In December 2011, Chief Snyder (yes, the same one later found at the storage unit) claimed there was no evidence to investigate allegations that officers were giving pills and alcohol to teenage girls and having sex with them before one officer shot and wounded another in December 2008. An investigation led to the imprisonment of those officers on charges of having sex with 14- and 16-year-old girls.
If this is law enforcement in Bradley County, we'd hate to meet the criminals.