T he mayor and City Council in Cleveland (Tennessee) should be willing to launch an investigation of the city’s police department, and of its chief, for failure to promptly investigate reports to the department in the spring of 2008 that Cleveland policemen were having sex (i.e., statutory rape) and using illicit prescription with underage girls. Mayor Tom Rowland and councilmen David May, George Poe, Richard Banks and Avery Johnson made it appallingly clear on Monday, however, that they are as unwilling now to assume accountability for the police department’s failure to promptly stop child abuse, as was Police Chief Wes Snyder when he reportedly learned of the accusations.
The charges were not pursued for seven months, and then only as an accidental offshoot of an unrelated investigation involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation into an accidental shooting of a police officer.
Snyder has claimed that he didn’t have enough factual information to launch an investigation when he received reports of child abuse, statutory rape and illicit drug use by at least two of his policemen. That’s a poor excuse on its face: Investigations are started to learn the facts about such reports.
In any case, this newspaper’s investigation over the last month reveals that Snyder possessed information that begged an investigation in May of 2008. He just didn’t bother to investigate it.
The mother of one of the girls involved called the police department in mid-May of 2008, demanding that the police department stop officer Dennis Hughes from coming around her 15-year-old daughter. Assistant Chief Gary Hicks testified in an unrelated civil case last month that he told Chief Snyder a few days after the mother’s call that some officers were reportedly using prescription drugs, including Hydrocodone, and having sex with underage girls. Hicks said Snyder told him to “get their (the officers) attention.”