What started out as a basic inquiry into contracting police services with St. Louis County has turned into a standoff for City of Dellwood aldermen.
Four of the eight aldermen refuse to attend board meetings in protest of voting on a resolution to dissolve the Dellwood police department and contract with St. Louis County Police. The county department would hire current officers if they were qualified, aldermen said.
The city of about 5,000 is 85 percent African-American, and only two of the 15 police officers are black.
Many residents who regularly attend board meetings say they are afraid to speak out in favor of the resolution because Dellwood police officers have visited their homes to talk with them about the board decision. About 250 residents and outsiders have spoken irately against contracting with the county police in the past month.
However, Aldermen Kimberly Kemp, Dawnn Tanksley, Linda Cunningham and Richard Williams said those people do not represent the majority of their constituents and do not regularly attend meetings.
The four aldermen – Donald Haynes, Karen Bober, Richard Culberson and James Lovings – say they will not come to a board meeting until the issue is taken off the agenda.
But Mayor Loretta Johnson, the first African-American mayor of Dellwood, said she will not do it.
“Just in the past few weeks, I’ve learned just how powerful our police department is, and the politics surrounded by that department,” Johnson said. “I will not be intimidated in taking something off the agenda for them to do their job.”
‘They were terrified’
It all started when Johnson, who was elected in April, learned from surrounding mayors that their crime rates dropped when they partnered with St. Louis County Police. Johnson asked the county police to talk with the police board at its Nov. 23 meeting. At that meeting, the three police board members, Aldermen Tanksley, Haynes and Williams, voted unanimously to have the county police give a presentation of services at the Nov. 28 board meeting in open session.
By the following Friday, rumors had spread that all police were about to lose their jobs, and that the aldermen were going to vote on a contract Monday. However, Johnson said she made it clear at the police board meeting that contracts had not been discussed.
That Friday, residents reported to Williams and Tanksley that Detective Brian Law, the department’s only detective, drove in a police vehicle to various people’s homes. He was asking for their support in saving his job.
“They were terrified,” Williams said. “I had to assure them that it would be okay. That didn’t do any good – they are still afraid.”
Residents have told Tanksley that they support the change, but they will not attend board meetings because they are afraid the police will go to their homes to harass them and give them tickets.
“The day they started canvassing, I had several residents that were offended and afraid,” Tanksley said. “They felt like they were being targeted. They were intimidated.”
The shooting
That Friday night on Nov. 25, Williams heard about 15 shots coming from the house behind his home, and he immediately called the police. He was standing outside when the first police officer, who is African-American, arrived at the scene. A backup car arrived with two white officers minutes after. These officers looked around and said they didn’t find anything, so they went back to the station. Williams was furious, he said.
The police were called again when Williams’ neighbor – a young woman with children – called to report that she found her house shot up when she returned home. Detective Law did not report to the scene. As the department’s only detective, Law should have investigated, Williams said. Instead, he told the officer on the scene to take pictures and gather bullet shells, said Williams, who was on the scene when the officer got the phone call from Law.
The following Monday, Chief Fred Haunold was placed on administrative leave.
County finds lack of control
Lt. Norman Mann of the St. Louis County Police is serving as the interim department leader, and the county has conducted assessments of the Dellwood department.
Through a Sunshine request, The St. Louis American obtained St. Louis County’s audit of the Dellwood police evidence locker room, where county police found numerous inadequacies.
“My initial findings were lack of accountability, no evidence receipts, no in/out log book to show what should and should not be there,” wrote Detective Douglas Fite, supervisor of the property control unit. The evidence database was also flawed and lacked proper documentation.
“We have cases that may have been compromised by lack of control,” Williams said. With lack of control in the evidence room, pending court cases could get thrown out, he said.
Three from the old regime
Four of the aldermen said they want to see an end to the conflict and are ready to vote on the issue. But the other four are not.
Three of these four – Culberson, Bober and Haynes – have been in office since the 1990s. Through a Sunshine request, The St. Louis American obtained a recent audit of the city government for 2009 that showed 17 findings of “control deficiencies and material weaknesses.”
According to the audit, the city had not developed written accounting and internal control procedures. Monthly financial statements were not prepared or presented to the Board of Aldermen. There were checks and credit card transactions that were never recorded. The city didn’t have all the required documentation to hire an employee on file.
All findings are violations of federal compliance requirements for local governments.
In response, Haynes said the audit “found some things that we could do better procedural-wise, and that was it. Plain and simple. There was a budget presented to the aldermen every year.”
Culberson and Bober did not return phone calls from The American.
Pay-outs and paper shredding
In early 2010, several aldermen pushed the former City Administrator Tom Zak to order an audit.
Soon after the board hired the firm CR Williams & Associates LLC to conduct the audit in October 2010, Zak resigned. For 19 years, he had been the administrator and managed city operations.
In the weeks that followed, there were two checks written to Iron Mountain, a paper shredding company, from Rita Bovinett, the former police chief’s clerk, according to city records.
Tanksley, who was elected in 2009, said she and other board members were never informed about shredding documents. Nor were they aware of a payout check written to Zak for $50,852.28, which included 1,212 vacation hours.
Zak did not return The American’s email with questions about why he resigned and what documents were shredded.
Tanksley said she first learned of that check and two others after the audit was released. The other checks went to former police chief Dan Chapman, who retired in the spring, for $34,035.83 and $8,736.63 for Bovinett, who also left city government.
Haynes said, “Everybody was made aware of it. There was vacation time and stuff that was owed. We were told about it.” Haynes said it wasn’t presented before the board because it was an executive decision made by the former mayor Jack Agnew.
“I just thought it was terrible some of the things done under the previous administration,” Alderman Kimberly Kemp said. “It is aggravating that you sit on the board and let that happen, but you don’t want to sit on the vote in a justified manner?”