Is It True…that the CCO have been informed by numerous sources within the Evansville Police and Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s departments that all traffic grants have been suspended effective today? …that these grants are administered by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? …that the grants are hereby suspended by the afore-mentioned administrations until further notice. … these suspended, federally sponsored programs, include the Aggressive Driving Patrol, Seat Belt Saturation Patrol, D.U.I. Saturation Patrol, DUI Checkpoints, and Operation Pull Over? …that the above disciplinary action of suspending these programs was caused by the alleged problem of “Ghost Employment†in the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Department as reported yesterday by News 25? … the suspensions of these programs not only affect the Sheriff’s Department but also the Evansville Police Department since the grant funding is shared equally by both entities? … the suspension of the above grants of these meaningful programs will immediately affect public safety? …that we cannot wait to see what Channel 25 and Channel 14 do with this breaking “CCO Mole†generated news story? … that we cannot wait to see what kind of political spin the administrators of these above mentioned, federally funded programs will say as to what the reasons for these grants being suspended are? … we hope that they will be forthright and say it is because the federal administrators of these programs are going to perform a full blown compliance audit? …that this whole situation is not only embarrassing, but shameful?
This is a travesty in the worsy way. The loss of grant money is unfathomable. Who is charge of making sure grant money is used properly? Whether it be Sheriff Williams or Dupty Cheif Wedding someone has a lot explaining to do. In there explanation of basic dereliction, of duties they should also be explaining how to get those funds back. Sounds like the high sherriff and the chief deputy were to busy buying hummers.
Because a deputy chooses to be dishonest and say he is working the grant, when apparently he wasn’t, doesnt reflect on anyone but himself. When it was discovered and found out to be true, the Sheriff and Merit Board took appropriate action.
But again, when you are managing a taxpayer funded grant such as this, there has to be some accountability. Bottom line this is a lack of supervision regardless if the appropriate action was taken later or not. And again your arguement has no merit sir.
Oh, I beg to differ. I think it has plenty of merit. Before you start throwing out a bunch of they’s and them’s, lets wait and see if it’s a he or him. Looks like to me he was caught and I’m sure it wasn’t the evil deputy fairy who caught HIM. Lets use some common sense, shall we
You are exactly right. I am sure more details will emerge. And we will eventually find out who was responsible for verifing the hours worked or in this case not worked.
Troll Patrol, I have been following your posts for quite some time and it is apparent to me that you have no common sense. Some of your remarks are absurd! You certainly have no problem making accusations and nasty remarks when, in fact, you have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you are the evil deputy fairy.
HELLO, looks like they already did.
Some of my posts absurd? Absolutely, they are suppose to be. A lot of it correct? You bet!
Troll Patrol, last week you said you were going back to work and we would not hear from you so much, you must have lots of time on your hands again, are you working a traffic grant…wait…no…those were suspended.
That’s the beauty of a 4 and 2 schedule.
I heard Dave Wedding was in charge of that grant program! What does that say about his leadership skills! Hopefully everyone votes for Jim Tucker for Sheriff when the time comes!
Do you honestly think that Chief Wedding follows the deputies around like a secret agent, spying on their every move? I assume he took the word on hours they posted as being factual. I guess he could hook each one up to a lie detector and question them after each shift if need be.
Maybe he is not the one who checked it all, maybe someone saying they were the Chief Deputy signed off on it. Unless someone seen him sign off on the time, on video tape, with a notary watching…. It probably didn’t happen. Oh wait…..
No but I would expect him to verify the hours worked and make sure it is correct before spending taxpayer money. Your argument has no merit sir.
Once again…. HE was caught.
Thank you for stating the obviuos. However it should have never happened if whomever was managing the time cards and verifing the hours worked was doing their job. Again clear lack of supervision.
There are plenty of officers and deputies that work grants. DO YOU REALLY THINK A SUPERVISER RIDES WITH EACH OFFICER OR DEPUTY? If they did, you would be arguing that it is a waste of tax payers money to pay a supervisor to babysit. Let’s use some common sense here.
What breaking CCO mole generated news story? Channel 25 broke the story Tuesday at 6:00 PM. about Mosby getting suspended. Channel 25 had the story about the grants for the sheriff and EPD being suspended on the 4:00 news today. Your post was put up at 4:21 pm today.
Exactly!!!!!!!
+100
Maybe the mole forgot to tell the CCO that they got their info from channel 14 and 25î„…
Driving Patrol, Seat Belt Saturation Patrol, D.U.I. Saturation Patrol, DUI Checkpoints, and Operation Pull Over? Not a one of these programs are effective. While they may pull one or two drunks off the street. they violate the personal rights of hundreds law abiding individuals. While costing us tax payer 100,000s of dollars. This may seem ok to some folks. Those who consider every one guilty until proven innocent. I live in a world where most folks are not breaking the law and do not believe most folks need to be harassed by LEOs.
Amen. What business do the Feds have directing pullover operations in Evansville, IN?
All do respect sir, these grants are very effective in saving lives. Ask a mother or father, a sister, a family member who has lost a loved one in a tragic DUI accident how unimportant it is to pull over drunk drivers? Ask a mother whose child was in a serious accident but had a seat belt on. Ask her how thankful she was that her teenager had their seat belt on. Can you say that they are not important to thousands of people that endure this pain?
This argument is a straw man. It’s an emotional argument meant to stifle actual rational thought and debate.
The real questions we should be asking are these: Why send the money to the Feds in the first place? Why do we need a middle man? Why not just keep our tax dollars local and cut out the Washington administration costs?
No one is saying stop patrolling and let drunk drivers run amok. We’re saying we don’t need the Feds telling us what to do and how to do it. Currently, local law enforcement sees these grants as a windfall of cash and they will do whatever it takes to ensure they continue to get at least these amounts or more the next fiscal year, apparently even if that means creating ghost patrols. It’s similar to the way people routinely spend every cent of their tax returns, seeing it as a windfall and “free money”, forgetting it was their own money in the first place.
Benchmarks and quotas sometimes attached with these programs create an atmosphere ripe for abuse.
No, but what we can say is because of the lack of supervision this grant has been suspended until further notice!
+1
They’re cops. They can do no wrong. How about the guy that just sat and watched a portable TV on the job? I’d almost call that ghost employment. He got a week off paid for his trouble. I often wonder how many of the deputies I see working security at private events, using taxpayer funded equipment I might add, are on the regular clock anyway.
Ok. John Doe, I finally figured it out…. you’re the evil deputy and policeman fairy that catches all the big bad officers doing bad things! Shoo, I can rest easy now.
+1
100% agreed. It’s not just roadblocks that get Fed funding with strings, it’s the entire militarization of police that is being funded and encouraged by the Feds. They also give officers “counter terrorism” and “domestic terrorism” training in some places (not sure if it’s been done here in Indiana) where people with certain bumper stickers, for instance, or copies of certain books in their cars should be considered a suspected terrorist.
We don’t need these grants anyway. We need police forces that are more beholden to the people they are there to protect and less beholden to the Feds who are dangling carrots.
All that said, if fraud was committed at a higher level than one officer, I think it should be pursued and investigated and the grant money returned.
Didnt Chief Wedding just receive some type of award for being the administrator of this grant? Maybe those numbers were fabricated since it appears that they were not really working….
The numbers should be very easy to verify. Each traffic stop is reported via radio and or via computer. If personal information such as license and registration are ran through the system each search is logged and recorded. The media should ask to see the logs for each officer working grant shifts. This would show the number of traffic stops and the number of tickets and warning issued.
I think that’s how Deputy Mosby got caught. He claimed many many hours with no supportive documentation.
When I get to work overtime I produce something that can be seen by my bosses and they know I earned it.
This was nothing but ghost employment (a crime) and the sheriff has known about it for weeks. It wasn’t until the media started asking questions did this story see the light of day.
EPD and County Sheriffs shouldn’t have to rely Federal funds at all, for any reason. This reliance creates a dependency and a mechanism for control by the Feds that can be withdrawn if offices don’t do as they are told. This leads to the controversial problems of militarization of police forces as well.
In any case, this points to someone up the chain thinking the EPD or Sheriff’s office might have larger problems than just one guy screwing up his time cards.
Wow……. no words for this conspiracy theory. Thanks BLO (Brad Linzy Observer)
Did you also scoff at anyone trying to tell you Obama had a “kill list” of Americans he wants to assassinate and thinks he has the power to do it? Now that’s mainstream news.
That sounds like it came off of Fox News. I know they killed one American who was a high ranking Al Qaida.
No, they also killed a 16-year-old innocent boy and another man who happened to be there.
Even the friggin’ Guardian in the United Kingdom is reporting on this! Wake the hell up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo
I do tend to tune something like that out when the far right tries to play politics with it. I know that the far right is trying to distort facts and come up with complete lies to get political advantage.
Civilians, unfortunately, always get killed in wars and other confrontations.
WHAT? You’re calling The Guardian in Britain “far right”… Are you that insular and ignorant of the world around you?
You are so far gone, I should just tune you out and label you a complete lost cause, but for the benefit of anyone following this line of debate… This has NOTHING to do with politics.
Those people weren’t killed anywhere near a battlefield. They were in Yemen, and the whole reason this is even in the news now at all is because of the document that was just leaked where the Obama Administration is actually trying to legally justify – while not actually giving any legal basis – its idea of assassinating American citizens on American soil using drones or other means, extrajudicially, as judge, jury and executioner without any due process whatsoever. So tell me, Mr. Liberal, if this President’s name was Bush would you be raising a stink about it or sticking your head even further up your own ass?
Why don’t you just shut up and read this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo
The Guardian UK is “right wing”… That’s hilarious.
It sure looks right wing to me. I have never heard of it before. It doesn’t look like something that I would waste my time reading.
Remember EPD and sheriff’s, that seat belt grant, WINK,WINK….Don’t forget you owe us total control when we call upon you!
Anyone paying attention to your debate tactics is onto you. Choosing the least offensive thing in that list of grants and using that as a joke will only marginalize any argument you have.
It has been widely reported that the Justice Dept. has a training program for local police forces on “counter terrorism” in which they list all sort of militia groups, Ron Paul supporter, Occupiers, libertarians, even people simply sporting American flags as potential “domestic terrorists”.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/13021-justice-department-trained-police-to-link-political-activism-with-terror
…and it’s not just the training, it’s the hardware. The Feds have given jurisdictions all over the country funds for their SWAT teams, tanks, full auto weaponry, military style body armor, crowd control weaponry, etc.
These are all carrots that are dangled out there with strings attached.
Good thing we are smarter than the average waskly wabbit!
I beg to differ. If you’re indicative of the mindfulness we can expect from an average law enforcement officer, I’d say we’re in big trouble.
Ooohhh, good one….. once again BLO, dont post angry.
How do you propose to pay for these patrols? The County is broke. Do you propose not having these patrols? Do you think somebody that has a family member killed will want to hear about your militarization of police force.
What a stupid argument. That’s like saying drunk drivers aren’t to blame for their actions, police inaction is tame for not catching them. Surely you’re smarter than that. If the County is “broke”, then I guess we’ll have to have regular patrols that remain within our means.
PS: If we didn’t send our tax dollars to the Feds in the first place, ‘d have plenty of money. The current system has us sending money to a middle man (the Federal Government), who takes an administration cut, then gives it back to us with strings attached… And we need them why?
Your idea of remaining under the thumb of a pack of bureaucratic mobsters from Washington D.C. is a far superior idea to Freedom. My bad.
Deaths due to drunk driving have gone down considerably since they started using saturation patrols, DUI checkpoints and other means.
Without these, people will not be as conscience as to how much they drink, getting to something to drive, etc. and if somebody gets killed, it doesn’t matter who is responsible, they are just as dead.
Once again… I have no problem with saturation patrols, but I disagree we couldn’t fund them ourselves without the Feds.
Just quit typing, you sir are a fool, and show it with each comment!
I’m the fool, yet you can’t even muster a real argument.
It is a fact that our County Government is facing financial difficulties. The property tax caps have diminished the revenue that the county is receiving.
I want to stress that you need to focus on why Sgt. Mosby’s stripes were taken away from him and why Sheriff Williams did not ask Nick Hermann to review this decision prior to making it. As a foot note, we wonder why the Courier has been so quiet about all of this? Congratulation to Jordan Vandenberge of Channel 25 News for doing an outstanding with this story.
I agree. the courier just had a little blurb on it today, as did WFIE. TV25 has been on top of it.
I agree. There is a lot more to be told. Mosby lost his stripes and was suspended for 15 days because he filed a false police report about his credit card being lost and then used. in reality it was his girlfriend and her friend that used the credit card after they each found out he was in a relationship with both of them.
He should have been fired for the felony (fraud) and the misdemeanor (false police report) but Eric the Sheriff covered this up.
Come on, he committed a FELONY and Eris jusr demotes and suspends him. What a disgrace. There neds to be a big shake up at the Sheriff’s Dept starting at the top. The election can’t come soon enough!
IC 35-44.1-2-2
Obstruction of justice
    Sec. 2. (a) A person who:
        (1) knowingly or intentionally induces, by threat, coercion, or false statement, a witness or informant in an official proceeding or investigation to:
            (A) withhold or unreasonably delay in producing any testimony, information, document, or thing;
            (B) avoid legal process summoning the person to testify or supply evidence; or
            (C) absent the person from a proceeding or investigation to which the person has been legally summoned;
        (2) knowingly or intentionally in an official criminal proceeding or investigation:
            (A) withholds or unreasonably delays in producing any testimony, information, document, or thing after a court orders the person to produce the testimony, information, document, or thing;
            (B) avoids legal process summoning the person to testify or supply evidence; or
            (C) absents the person from a proceeding or investigation to which the person has been legally summoned;
        (3) alters, damages, or removes any record, document, or thing, with intent to prevent it from being produced or used as evidence in any official proceeding or investigation;
        (4) makes, presents, or uses a false record, document, or thing with intent that the record, document, or thing, material to the
point in question, appear in evidence in an official proceeding or investigation to mislead a public servant; or
        (5) communicates, directly or indirectly, with a juror otherwise than as authorized by law, with intent to influence the juror regarding any matter that is or may be brought before the juror;
commits obstruction of justice, a Class D felony.
    (b) Subsection (a)(2)(A) does not apply to:
        (1) a person who qualifies for a special privilege under IC 34-46-4 with respect to the testimony, information, document, or thing; or
        (2) a person who, as:
            (A) an attorney;
            (B) a physician;
            (C) a member of the clergy; or
            (D) a husband or wife;
        is not required to testify under IC 34-46-3-1.
As added by P.L.126-2012, SEC.54.
Interesting if it’s true. Would you be willing to tell us how you came upon this info? This could be a big scandal.
Wouldn’t surprise me if this is the lead in the next IIT.
News 25 first broke this story on Tuesday and they broke the grant story today there’s no disputing that. I think it’s important for everyone to keep in mind that one rogue deputy doesn’t define an entire department. just my two cents.
EPD sent out a press release to all news agencies today at just before 4. EPD broke the story themselves. It looks like News25 jumped on it about 20 minutes quicker than the CCO. Big deal, they both reported the same thing from the same source.
As the Public Information Officer for the Evansville Police Department, I can say that Cop Watcher’s post is not accurate. The only press release we sent out was to the CCO. It was sent AFTER this article was posted. (Around 4:40pm) The release was to let them know that despite the funding being suspended for both of us, no EPD officers were being investigated. It explained that the grant money comes to our community as one amount and is then divided between the two agencies. I also let them know that I had been contacted by Channel 25 earlier in the day. They had the same information the CCO Mole had. Double agent mole?
The EPD did not initiate this story and has not commented on the allegations because it did not involve an EPD employee. The VCSO is handling the incident.
I do not know what the purpose of Cop Watcher’s comments were, but the post was very misleading at the least.
Sgt. Jason Cullum
Who care who was first or second in reporting this important story that effect the overall public safety of our citizens.
Outstanding job CCO and Jordan Vandenberge of Channel 25 for bringing this story to the public attention. Together you all make a great media team.
I hope you all you all realize that there is much more to this story.
Badah bump bump bump
Another Mosby bites the dust
and another one’s gone, another one’s gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, you gotta get them fools
Another one bites da dust
Badah bump bump bump
Another Mosby bites the dust
No kidding. We also have a barfly socialite on the city council. No wonder people are embarrassed to admit they’re from Evansville.
I don’t condone people ghosting as a whole but I’d like to learn more details about this before I can make a decision one way or the other. Ghosting is bad but if this was just him running an errand or something small out of his district while patrolling I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I’d say over 2/3rds of America has done that before. Now if he was just writing down time completely without showing up at all, that’s a whole different story.
I agree. This seems to be blown way out of proportion for political purposes and now it cost the department several grants.
I SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT and understand that theirs is a difficult job. For the vast majority of Police actions and for the apprehension of truly violent offenders, we are forever indebted. The stories below, however, while unrelated, do in a way lead this reader to wonder if subtle changes in Police policy, discipline and training could result in fewer lawsuits, more respect for LEO’S and better outcomes for all involved.
_____
“Grandmother sues city, police department over June flash grenade†incident
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013…
_____
“UPDATE: Armed man escorted from zoo by police sues city of Evansville | PDFâ€
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011…
_____
“UPDATE: Sheriff’s office says deputies tried to shock man before fatally shooting him” http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012…
(Mr Lindal M. Johnson, a known mentally ill man, died in an incident that, IMHO, was unfortunate and perhaps poorly handled.)
_____
Personal observation:
Burdette Park and Aquatic Center, Park Rule #4 declares
“Firearms Prohibited†… IMHO, a clear violation of SB292 which prohibits Municipalities from enforcing laws which are in conflict with State Laws regarding the regulation of firearms. (paraphrased)
This may be another lawsuit just waiting to materialize.
http://forum.opencarry.org/forums/sho…
_____
Now we are made aware that a loss of Federal Funds is imminent because of alleged impropriety of one sort or another by a local LEO.
_____
Again:
I SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT and understand that theirs is a difficult job. For the vast majority of Police actions and for the apprehension of truly violent offenders, we are forever indebted. The stories above, however, while unrelated, do in a way lead this reader to wonder if subtle changes in Police policy, discipline and training could result in fewer lawsuits, more respect for LEO’S and better outcomes for all involved.
Respectfully
Whatever happende to “Trust but verify?”
Comments are closed.