As hundreds of students milled around tables during Career Day in the University Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last week, an individual representing the Cleveland, Tenn., Police Department sat alone looking bored.
If students had been paying attention, she may have appeared to be a pariah because of the department she represented.
It hasn’t been a glorious recent past for the department, after all, the past four-plus years seeing police department staffers involved in sex with underage girls, explicit cellphone texts, sexual misconduct, on-the-clock trysts and extramarital affairs.
Last fall, though, the city hired a new police chief in Mark Gibson, and he undoubtedly has spent his first few months trying to repair the reputation the department – and the city, in its wake – received from its various scandals.
If former members of the department are receiving counseling or changing their habits in the wake of the past few years in this city of 41,000 that is the home of seven religious denominations and several megachurches, all well and good.