| Blog and Media Roundup - Sunday, August 18, 2013; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 18 2013, 05:06 AM (292 Views) | |
| abb | Aug 18 2013, 05:06 AM Post #1 |
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http://www.heraldsun.com/news/x2042198107/Assistant-police-chief-files-EEOC-complaint Assistant police chief files EEOC complaint Aug. 17, 2013 @ 06:15 PM Ray Gronberg One of the Durham Police Department’s three assistant chiefs has filed a discrimination charge against the city, alleging he was passed over for a promotion for having complained about Chief Jose Lopez’s treatment of black officers. Winslow Forbes, commander of the department’s southside operations, says Lopez broke with department custom to give Deputy Chief Anthony Marsh his current post at the head of the administrative bureau this spring. Forbes said he scored as well in a promotion review as the department’s other current deputy chief, Larry Smith, when he and Smith in the summer of 2012 applied to lead its patrol officers and detectives. The usual practice when the administrative deputy’s post opened soon afterward would have been to give him that job, Forbes said. But Lopez opted to hold a new promotion review and wound up giving the job to Marsh, who had been an assistant chief for only about seven months. Deputy chiefs are the department’s second-ranking commanders, assistants its third-ranking. Forbes and one of his lawyers, Caitlyn Thomson, allege Lopez retaliated against Forbes because he’d objected in 2011 and again in 2012 to what he saw as discrimination within the department. “Chief Lopez was not happy with [Forbes] because of his assertion there was race discrimination going on,” Thomson said in an interview Friday after she submitted the charge to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission is the federal agency that conducts initial investigations of job-discrimination claims. When it finds discrimination it presses employers to make good on the situation, in rare cases taking direct action against them through a lawsuit. More commonly it opts to issue a worker a “right to sue” letter giving the federal courts jurisdiction over a subsequent lawsuit by the worker. Thomson said workers like Forbes also have the separate option of pursuing a civil rights lawsuit in federal court. Forbes may go that route as well. “I would not assume we would wait until the end of the EEOC investigation to file a lawsuit,” said Thomson, who’s represented city and Durham Area Transit Authority workers in past cases. Comment from city officials was not immediately forthcoming. City Attorney Patrick Baker, Senior Assistant City Attorney Kim Rehberg and City Manager Tom Bonfield couldn’t be reached for comment Friday afternoon. But officials apparently had been aware of Forbes’ unhappiness. According to the EEOC complaint, the city Human Resources Department used a consultant to investigate his allegations this spring, finding the discrimination claim “not substantiated” and the retaliation claim one it was “unable to determine” the truth of. Thomson said she, Forbes and another lawyer working for Forbes, James Rogers, met with Bonfield and Rehberg July 16. The discussion, though “pleasant and cordial,” did not yield any “specific outcome,” Thomson said. Forbes’ EEOC complaint said he first raised the discrimination issue with Lopez in 2011 when the chief and a then-deputy chief told him they thought a lieutenant in the department wouldn’t be a good candidate for promotion to captain “because of her speech.” The lieutenant in question “had a style of speech referred to by linguists as ‘African-American vernacular English’” that is common in the South, the complaint said. Forbes made sure she received training for a promotion despite the views of department higher-ups. The issue resurfaced in 2012 after Smith beat out Forbes to be deputy chief over operations. “I did not file an official complaint at that time, but I discussed with Chief Lopez that there were many black officers who were qualified for promotion, yet he had consistently promoted non-black officers,’ Forbes said in his filing. Forbes alleged Lopez made a “racially offensive statement” to colleagues while preparing for an early July news conference on a recent string of shootings. The chief during preparations said all the recent victims had been black and involved in criminal activity. Another assistant chief pointed out that one of the victims was a lawyer. Lopez “responded by saying that the lawyer deserved to get shot because he was a public defender,” the complaint alleged. Thomson said the lawyer in question was not actually a public defender, but a practice-practice attorney who like herself volunteers to do court-appointed defense work. She added that she was “very disturbed” by the alleged comment given that the U.S. Constitution requires the government to make a defense lawyer available to people accused of crimes. The present top-level command staff of the Police Department, sworn officers holding the rank of captain and above, includes nine whites, seven blacks and one Hispanic. The Hispanic is Lopez. Smith is white. Forbes and Marsh are black. Forbes as southside operations commander is supervisor of the captains who orchestrate patrol and detective work in Districts 3 and 4, which cover southwest and south Durham. Before their promotions to deputy chief, Smith and Marsh headed northside operations, watching over Districts 1, 2 and 5. District 1 covers east Durham, District 2 covers north Durham and District 5 is the city’s central business district. Forbes remains in his post, Thomson said. “He’s had nothing but an excellent performance record for 25 years,” she added. “Certainly if any action were to be taken [against him] at this point, it would appear to me to be retaliatory.” |
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| abb | Aug 18 2013, 05:15 AM Post #2 |
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Despite SBI settlement in Brown case, discredited agent is still on the job Published: August 17, 2013 Updated 10 hours ago Floyd Brown eats his lunch during a visit to the McLaurin Vocational Training Center in Hamlet on Aug. 14, 2013. The state has begun to pay him the $7.85 million it promised in settling the suit attorneys filed after he was exonerated of a murder that SBI agent Mark Isley accused him of without conducting a thorough investigation. Brown spent 14 years in a psychiatric hospital based on the murder confession Isley recorded that subsequent judges ruled he did not have the mental capacity to deliver with such detail and clarity. TRAVIS LONG — tlong@newsobserver.com Buy Photo By Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke — jneff@newsobserver.com / mlocke@newsobserver.com For nearly two years, SBI agent Mark Isley failed to file reports involving serious allegations of wrongdoing against his colleagues at the Anson County Sheriff’s Department, according to documents attached to a lawsuit against Isley. The information turned out to be on target: The two officers ended up in federal prison for soliciting payoffs from accused criminals. The new details about Isley surfaced in the lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown that was settled last week. The two cases have followed Isley during his 24-year career, but SBI leaders have taken no public action. Only in 2010, after The News & Observer chronicled Brown’s confinement based on an implausible confession, did the SBI launch an internal investigation. It followed at least five years of documented concerns about Brown’s arrest. Isley, 48, has been the supervisor of the Medicaid Fraud Unit, where he is paid $86,215 a year, since 2005. Before that, he was a field agent and a supervisor in the Charlotte area. Isley’s journey at Anson In 1993, Isley was sent to Anson County, where he worked closely with two sheriff’s deputies, Bud Hutchinson and Robert Poplin. For years, the two deputies demanded cash from criminal suspects or their family members in return for dropping charges. Isley heard about the conspiracy as early as July 1994, when a defendant told Isley he had paid Poplin $3,100 to reduce breaking and entering charges from a felony to a misdemeanor, Isley later wrote in a report on the matter. An officer must report such allegations promptly. But Isley did not file reports about that complaint or several others until 1996. That’s when Isley met with a Wadesboro police officer and a woman who said Poplin asked for $1,000 to drop charges against the woman and her sister. In his deposition, Isley contended that he didn’t stay silent until 1996. He said it was “very likely” that he gave a verbal report to his boss, Bart Burpeau, soon after hearing about each allegation. Burpeau is dead. Burpeau’s boss, James Woodard, testified that he only heard of the allegations after Isley met with the Wadesboro police officer in 1996. Woodard said Burpeau would have told him immediately of the earlier allegations. SBI records don’t mention Isley informing Burpeau prior to 1996. Brown’s lawyers say Isley informed his supervisors in 1996 only because the police officer had caught wind of the conspiracy. On July 5, 1996, Isley dictated seven reports about Poplin and Hutchinson. All but one of the incidents dated to 1994 or 1995. In one, a man told Isley that he had paid Hutchinson and Poplin $1,000 in cash to drop a rape charge. The man already faced another rape charge. Hutchinson and Poplin later pleaded guilty to racketeering and went to federal prison. ‘Someone I admired’ “Detective Hutchinson was someone I admired very much and I loved very much,” Isley testified in a 2011 deposition. Isley rose through the ranks as Brown’s lawyers raised claims that Isley had falsified Brown’s confession. SBI leaders promoted Isley to be in charge of the Medicaid unit in 2005 after Isley filed a racial discrimination claim that said he had been wrongly denied a promotion despite his excellent job reviews and unblemished career. Isley has never been disciplined, Cooper’s office said Friday. Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/17/3115336/isley-slow-to-report-tips-on-cop.html#storylink=cpy |
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| abb | Aug 18 2013, 05:22 AM Post #3 |
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In search of bad guys, novelist finds UNC athletics By Luke DeCock If athletic scandals in Chapel Hill have seemed stranger than fiction, it’s only fitting someone finally got around to working them into actual fiction. Larry Rochelle has lived in the area for almost seven years, but it took a tour of Chapel Hill’s hidden spots from one of his Fearrington Village neighbors followed by the continuing revelations at North Carolina to spawn his latest mystery thriller, “Back to the Rat,” published via Lulu. Rochelle will be reading from the book, his 13th novel starring tennis-pro protagonist Palmer Morel, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Rochelle knew he wanted his next Morel novel to involve brain-washing and mind-control techniques, but he needed bad guys. He found them in Chapel Hill, where the real-life scandal at North Carolina served as fodder for the book. “The academic scandal just resonated with me, perhaps because I’ve taught in college” said Rochelle, a former junior-college professor. With literary license, Rochelle imagines it going back decades, much bigger and far more nefarious. Events in the book spin out of control, involving the CIA, organized crime and other malefactors on a grand scale. For Rochelle, it wasn’t a giant leap from what’s going on at North Carolina. “You look at point shaving, and then you look at what’s happening at UNC,” Rochelle said. “They’re very young, they don’t have much money, and they’re relying on a guy named ‘Fats’ who’s loaning them cars and such. “My concern with them is, what do they want from the players? Is there a quid pro quo? Maybe you don’t score so much in the next game, or don’t make it 20 points, make it 10. I don’t know when you take that step if you’re a player or a gambler.” DeCock: @LukeDeCock, 919-829-8947 http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/17/4244081/real-life-events-at-unc-spawn.html |
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