Latest news with #HancevillePoliceDepartment
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nearly 60 cases dismissed due to corruption in Alabama police department
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Nearly 60 felony cases will be dropped in a small Alabama town because they were compromised by what a grand jury called a 'rampant culture of corruption" in the local police department, according to a statement on Wednesday. The grand jury determined that 58 felony criminal cases had been tainted by corruption in the Hanceville Police Department in northern Alabama, after four officers and the police chief were indicted on a variety of charges related to mishandling or removing evidence from the department's evidence room. The indictment included a recommendation that the department be 'immediately abolished.' The case roiled the town of approximately 3,200 people about 45 miles (70 kilometers) north of Birmingham. Cullman County District Attorney Champ Crocker said that even one compromised case 'is too many' but that "the Grand Jury had no other recourse,' in a statement on Wednesday night. He added that most of the cases were drug-related and only a few were personal crimes with victims. The 58 tossed cases were selected based on an audit conducted by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigations. The audit found that nearly 40% of all 650 evidence bags and almost a third of all firearms weren't documented before being stored in the evidence room. There was also a wide array of evidence that appeared to be missing, including firearms, cash and illicit drugs. Hanceville Mayor Jimmy Sawyer placed the whole department on leave in February, and then following weeks of polarized debate, announced in March that the department would be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. A spokesperson for Hanceville's municipal government did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Thursday afternoon. ___ Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Winnipeg Free Press
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Nearly 60 cases dismissed due to corruption in Alabama police department
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Nearly 60 felony cases will be dropped in a small Alabama town because they were compromised by what a grand jury called a 'rampant culture of corruption' in the local police department, according to a statement on Wednesday. The grand jury determined that 58 felony criminal cases had been tainted by corruption in the Hanceville Police Department in northern Alabama, after four officers and the police chief were indicted on a variety of charges related to mishandling or removing evidence from the department's evidence room. The indictment included a recommendation that the department be 'immediately abolished.' The case roiled the town of approximately 3,200 people about 45 miles (70 kilometers) north of Birmingham. Cullman County District Attorney Champ Crocker said that even one compromised case 'is too many' but that 'the Grand Jury had no other recourse,' in a statement on Wednesday night. He added that most of the cases were drug-related and only a few were personal crimes with victims. The 58 tossed cases were selected based on an audit conducted by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigations. The audit found that nearly 40% of all 650 evidence bags and almost a third of all firearms weren't documented before being stored in the evidence room. There was also a wide array of evidence that appeared to be missing, including firearms, cash and illicit drugs. Hanceville Mayor Jimmy Sawyer placed the whole department on leave in February, and then following weeks of polarized debate, announced in March that the department would be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. A spokesperson for Hanceville's municipal government did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Thursday afternoon. ___ Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Cullman County DA says 58 Hanceville PD cases deemed ‘unprosecutable' by grand jury
CULLMAN, Ala. (WHNT) — The Cullman County District Attorney says a grand jury has determined that 58 cases investigated by the Hanceville Police Department cannot be prosecuted. District Attorney Champ Crocker said a Cullman County Grand jury conceded in April and voted to dismiss 58 felony cases previously investigated by the Hanceville Police Department. Crocker said the dismissals are due to 'the illegal actions' of several former Hanceville Police officers. Alabama bill giving ABC Board regulation over THC products derived from hemp awaiting Gov. Ivey's signature 'The Grand Jury that unanimously indicted the former Hanceville police officers determined that those officers' cases, and other cases from the Hanceville Police Department, were unprosecutable,' The district attorney said. 'The same Grand Jury reconvened in April and voted to no-bill, or dismiss, 58 felony cases due to the illegal actions of those former Hanceville officers. Most of these cases involved drugs, and only a few were personal crimes with victims. One dismissal is too many, but the Grand Jury had no other recourse.' Crocker said the jury convened after the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation completed its audit of the department. That audit showed that 249 pieces of evidence in the department's evidence room were not documented with case numbers and approximately 78 evidence bags were unsealed or torn open. Crocker shared images of the results of that audit, which can be found here: (Courtesy of the Cullman County District Attorney's Office) (Courtesy of the Cullman County District Attorney's Office) (Courtesy of the Cullman County District Attorney's Office) (Courtesy of the Cullman County District Attorney's Office) Crocker also shared several photos showing the state of the evidence room. This all comes after an investigation into the death of a Hanceville dispatcher, Christopher Willingham. The Cullman County Coroner said Willingham died of an accidental drug overdose in his office. The death investigation led officials with multiple agencies to look into what was happening within the Hanceville Police Department. On Feb. 19, Crocker and Sheriff Matt Gentry announced that five Hanceville Police Officers, including Police Chief Jason Marlin, and one of the officer's wives were arrested on various charges including tampering, solicitation and failure to report. Crocker shared other findings from the Cullman County Grand Jury, which found that the 'death of former Hanceville dispatcher Chris Willingham is the direct result of Hanceville Police Department's negligence, lack of procedure, general incompetence, and disregard for human life.' The grand jury also recommended that the Hanceville Police Department be abolished. The Hanceville City Council later acted on that recommendation by voting to disband the department entirely, with the goal of starting a new police department. The city said its first step would be hiring a new police chief. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Law and disorder: Police oversight and training confront a changing landscape
A community in Alabama may soon be forced to close its local police department. At the end of February, a grand jury recommended disbanding the Hanceville Police Department, concluding that it "recently operated as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency." City officials have said they are considering the recommendation, but for now, the department is, in effect, shuttered. Five officers have been arrested, and the entire force has been placed on leave. One state away, a former Rankin County sheriff's deputy came clean to Mississippi Today in early March about his role in a two-decade reign of terror by the department's "Goon Squad." The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, said that he and his colleagues regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects, lied in official reports, and frequently seized and destroyed evidence without a warrant during drug raids. Dedmon, like several former deputies from Rankin County, is serving prison time after being convicted last year in the brutal assault and torture of two Black men. Neither case will be shocking to regular readers of The Marshall Project. Previous editions have highlighted similarly extreme—even cartoonish—instances of police misconduct, corruption and brutality. We have also covered how some of those cases have triggered efforts at reform and accountability. But as the federal government, and to a lesser extent, public opinion, increasingly turns away from concerns over policing—more than four years since protests over police violence overtook the national discourse—the future of police accountability looks uncertain. Deadly police violence has increased slightly since 2020. Statistics on police killings per capita show a slight but durable increase since the pandemic and George Floyd protests, according to a The Marshall Project analysis of the Mapping Police Database. Numbers released at the beginning of March suggest this trend continued through 2024, even as violent crime rates have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice has insinuated that it will no longer pursue the kinds of federal investigations that regularly followed high profile acts of police violence during the Obama and Biden era. President Trump also rescinded an executive order signed by former President Biden in 2022 that established use-of-force restrictions for federal law enforcement and created a national database for tracking misconduct, which all federal law enforcement agencies were required to submit to. In February, the Trump administration took that database offline, The Washington Post reported. Because of its short lifespan, it's difficult to assess how effective the database was, or could have been, at its stated goal: preventing officers with a history of serious misconduct from finding new jobs in law enforcement. The single report released about the database in December 2024 found that despite nearly 10,000 queries run by officials in the first eight months of 2024, only 25 searches were made by agencies seeking information on an officer from outside their own department. The vast majority of misconduct incidents captured in the database were generated by border enforcement agents and corrections officers in federal prisons, The Appeal reported in February. The executive branch isn't the only part of the federal government to sidestep a role in police accountability. In early March, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have increased the legal responsibility police have to ensure they have the correct address when conducting raids on the homes of crime suspects. These "wrong home" raids can create lasting trauma for the people they ensnare. A lawsuit filed on Feb. 25 in Denver, for example, alleged that police looking for a man in apartment 307, instead raided apartment 306, and wound up locking a mother and her 5-year-old and 6-year-old daughters in a police car for an hour. In March, Anjanette Young marked the six-year anniversary of a wrong-home raid that made national news in Chicago. Young was handcuffed and left naked despite explaining to officers that they were in the wrong place. She has since become an advocate for changing the way police approach these kinds of arrests. "Six years since I stood before officers—crying, pleading, afraid—only to be ignored," Young said at a news conference outside City Hall at the end of February, WBEZ Chicago reported. "And yet I stand here again, afraid and demanding for justice, accountability, still demanding that those in power would keep their promise." Beyond changes in how law enforcement is (and isn't) subject to oversight and accountability, developments in late February have also raised some questions about who enters the profession and how they are trained. In New York City, the NYPD announced that it's lowering its educational hiring standards in response to what officials describe as a recruitment crisis. With new applications down by more than half since 2017, the department is reducing its college credit requirements from 60 to 24 credits—while also reinstating a timed 1.5-mile run requirement that the department dropped in 2023, partly based on the belief it would help more women meet the qualifications. The return of that requirement comes just days after The Associated Press published an investigation which found that at least 29 police recruits have died in training over the past decade, often from heatstroke, excessive physical stress, or underlying medical conditions that were exacerbated by training activities. A disproportionate number of the deaths occurred in Black trainees with the sickle cell trait, a genetic condition which can cause fatal complications under high physical stress in otherwise healthy people. This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hanceville Mayor releases statement on decision to disband police department
HANCEVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — The City of Hanceville's Mayor released a statement Monday about the decision to disband the Hanceville Police Department. Mayor Jim Sawyer said that looking ahead, 'the city's goal is to establish a new police department built on a foundation of integrity and service.' Morgan County Sheriff's Office seeking information on man wanted for outstanding warrants You can read the full statement from the mayor below. Last week, the City of Hanceville faced the difficult decision to disband the Hanceville Police Department. This step was not taken lightly and came after careful deliberation, consultation with legal counsel, and a thorough analysis of the city's financial standing. While the hope had been to retain the department in its current form, it became clear that the best path forward, both legally and financially, was to rebuild from the ground up. This decision allows us to fulfill our responsibility as stewards of the city's limited tax revenues while ensuring the safety and well-being of our community. We are deeply grateful to the officers and employees who served honorably, and this decision in no way diminishes our appreciation for their dedication. For those impacted by this decision, we extend our heartfelt gratitude and regret for the challenges this may bring. Looking ahead, the city's goal is to establish a new police department built on a foundation of integrity and service. We are committed to hiring a new chief who can lead this effort and assemble a team that embodies the values of our community. In the interim, we remain thankful to the Cullman County Sheriff's Office for stepping in to provide law enforcement coverage and ensuring that our residents remain safe during this transition. The City of Hanceville remains focused on building a stronger future for our citizens, and we thank our community for its understanding and support as we move forward together. Hanceville Mayor Jim Sawyer On Friday, Sawyer fired the remainder of the police department. White House questions authority of judge's verbal order on Venezuelan deportation flights Selena's killer, Yolanda Saldívar, says singer 'partly to blame' for own death: Report Appeals court denies Trump's bid to immediately reverse fired federal workers' reinstatement National Guard members killed in cartel ambush No, the US won't be returning the Statue of Liberty to France The letter, given to the Hanceville Police Dispatcher during a meeting with Mayor Sawyer, said due to the pending criminal charges against several former Hanceville Police officers and the recent recommendations from the grand jury to abolish the police department it has been decided that it is in the best interest of the city to cut the rest of the department. There were 12 remaining employees with the department after five officers, including the chief, were indicted last month. The letter states that the remaining employees will be paid through March 21. Any sick or vacation time they have remaining will be paid out. Medical insurance will remain through April 1. Sawyer said that the employees affected by this decision would be able to apply for a job if the department were to reopen. On Feb. 20, the entire department was placed on administrative leave and a Cullman County grand jury indicted five Hanceville police officers and one of their spouses and recommended the department be abolished as a result of an investigation following a dispatcher's overdose death in August 2024. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
