Hanceville, Alabama is a small town just north of Birmingham that, as of the 2020 census, has a population of only 3,217. When it comes to cops, though, size doesn’t really matter. Due to “corruption” within Hanceville’s police force, a grand jury not only indicted five police officers, including the police chief, but also recommended that the entire police force be abolished—immediately.
The grand jury didn’t come to this decision because of a single crime but rather a wide variety of crimes, some of which make these cops sound like real dipshits. “There is a rampant culture of corruption in the Hanceville Police Department that has recently operated as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency,” the grand jury reported. Sounds bad.
The biggest cause of concern was the cops’ “unfettered access” to the department’s evidence room. The cops had made a hole in the wall that granted them easy access to the evidence room and also used a green broomstick to “Jimmy open” the door.
Many of the details of the grand jury’s findings are still under wraps, so you’re not going to get much more detail about what the cops did with their unlimited access to the evidence room. One can assume, however, that some of the evidence that entered the room soon found its way out through the back door.
The grand jury also linked the death of a dispatcher from an apparent drug overdose to the department’s negligence. The deceased dispatcher also had unfettered access to the evidence room and, according to the autopsy report, had a cocktail of “fentanyl, gabapentin, diazepam, amphetamine, carisoprodol and methocarbamol” in his system at the time of his death. You can put two and two together from there.
The grand jury also brought up three officers with drug-related crimes that were somehow unrelated to the evidence room. One officer was accused of illegally distributing hydrocodone and steroids. The grand jury felt that when stacked on top of each other, all the department’s offenses were so egregious that the only way to solve the problem would be to dissolve the police department, abolishing it from existence.
Just because the grand jury recommended the Hanceville Police Department essentially be burned to the ground and its ashes scattered in the wind doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to happen. The town’s mayor, Jimmy Sawyer, says the City Council will try to address the issues with the police department to repair its reputation while considering the grand jury’s recommendations. That’s a pretty even-keeled response to a harsh grand jury ruling. You have to wonder if the mayor would have the same response if the grand jury had recommended the town’s entire police force be fired out of a cannon pointed at a brick wall, because it sounds like that’s what they were really trying to say.
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