A day ahead of a Tuesday public call-in session for the department’s national law enforcement reaccreditation process, Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond is defending his office amid multiple allegations of police brutality and misconduct.
Hammond’s comments came in response to an affidavit authored by District Attorney General Neal Pinkston in which he accused the sheriff’s office of a lack of cooperation with the criminal investigation into former deputy Daniel Wilkey, who faces 44 criminal charges.
“I read time after time after time where the sheriff’s department is thrown under the bus when all I’ve ever asked is to let these cases go through due process, which of course I’m not going to try these cases in the newspaper,” he said in an interview with the Times Free Press on Monday. “If my officers – any officers in any department – [are] found guilty of wrongdoing, they should be punished, including termination. I’m not going to fall in this trap of being emotional and just fire somebody because somebody sees something on video. Videos look bad. But videos should never be used to totally judge a man who is doing his duty.”
Pinkston has twice released dashboard camera footage in recent memory – in July 2019 and again in June of this year – showing different sheriff’s deputies engaged in acts that Pinkston has called “troubling.”
Footage released last week showed five Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office deputies repeatedly striking a Black man in Ooltewah. And the 2019 footage, which is what set off the criminal investigation into Wilkey, showed Wilkey “performing what appears to be an anal cavity search” of a man on the side of a Soddy-Daisy road, Pinkston wrote in his affidavit.