Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
The Asheville Citizen-Times piles on with more outrage over the recent Asheville Police Department scandals. Here’s a relevant section:
Unfortunately, other moral compasses have been pointing the wrong way in the Police Department. Taxpayers are on the hook for $48,000 as the city agreed last week to settle with a former police officer who brought a federal lawsuit claiming a supervising officer harassed her with sexist and racist text messages. The woman said in her suit that she reported being harassed by the former Officer of the Year, but the city failed to adequately address the problem.
The evidence room fiasco will be even more costly. City Council has approved spending up to $175,000 for an independent audit. Hogan said the cost would likely be covered from drug seizure money, but that’s still money that could be better spent fighting crime rather than cleaning up the Police Department’s mess.
The first priority is to account for every piece of evidence so criminal trials can resume as soon as possible.
To restore trust with prosecutors and the public, Hogan and his department must also demonstrate what kind of new auditing procedures are in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We need to see criminal charges coming out of the SBI probe so that whoever pilfered the painkillers or anything else is punished accordingly.
To be effective, justice must be swift and fair. All evidence has to be properly safeguarded to make sure the guilty are properly punished while the innocent are not railroaded into unjust sentences. The truth is that none of us can feel secure with our justice system at a standstill.
