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Mortal Kombat, City Government Edition: “Mayor…police…fight!”
Well things in Rochester, a suburb about a half-hour north of Detroit, seem to be a right mess. See, in Rochester (as in many other places, I suspect), there’s a ticket quota in place, meaning the each cop has to get a certain number of tickets and citations issued each month. And one of the easiest ways for cops to get some tickets out to meet their quota is with equipment violations - you know, where a car has a busted tail light, a dangling muffler, etc. So one day, a driver gets pulled over because his car’s got a broken headlight. That’s a violation. And since he apparently neglects to fix it, he ends up getting pulled over four more times for the same busted headlight. And last June, during one such traffic stop, the man is arrested because the cop realizes there’s a warrant out on the driver, stemming from an unpaid traffic ticket. All seems well and good, right?
Well as the title of this post may have suggested to you, this man turned out to be David Katulic, Mayor of Rochester, and the shit has now hit the fan.
Like most police departments, the Rochester department has access to a database which stores information about criminal records, outstanding warrants, driving records, etc. It’s only supposed to be used by prosecutors and cops who are actively investigating criminal activity, and it’s a misdemeanor to use it for personal use. Well in August, someone from the police department asked the sheriff’s office to conduct an investigation concerning this database. Specifically, there where concerns that the officer who arrested the mayor, along with three other officers, a sergeant and a dispatcher, all illegally used this database. The sheriff’s office has now conducted its criminal investigation and turned the information over to the prosecutor’s office, which is expected to make a decision this week on whether to push forward with charges.
So far there’s been no comment by anyone on how, exactly, the database was allegedly misused. Seems to me that this is part of the routine when there’s any traffic stop. Cops pull a car over. Cops check to make sure they didn’t pull over someone on the lam. Standard practice and procedure. Which of course leads one to the conclusion that this investigation may be nothing more than retaliation for the fact that it was the Mayor who was arrested. That’s clearly what the director of the Police Officers Association thinks:
The mayor had warrants out for his arrest. The officer arrested him. Why is he any different than some other criminal that’s got a warrant out for his arrest?
One officer from the department, who won’t say if he’s one of the ones under investigation (the names have not yet been released), says that police officers were specifically told to target the mayor. Which, coupled with the listing of the folks being investigated, could lead to something like this: maybe the sergeant decided to target the Mayor because he didn’t like these quotas, so he ordered the dispatcher to pull the Mayor’s driving info and send it out to these officers with instructions to repeatedly track him down. This is pure speculation on my part, but it’s the only thing that makes sense (of course, this still ignores the fact that the Mayor got pulled over five times and didn’t bother to fix a bloody headlight).
The Mayor, of course, has nothing to say on the matter aside from the fact that he holds no grudges against the cops.
Regardless of how this plays out - retaliation by the Mayor and his goons, or a targeted sting by some rogue cops - it’s all just a mess. And the shit storm between the cops and the city government has apparently been growing as a result of all this. For example, the police chief says that when this whole investigation began last month, the City Counsel considered totally dissolving the police department, and just contracting everything out to the sheriff.
Rochester is supposedly pretty affluent, so I’m sure the local citizenry must be real pleased to see that this is how their tax dollars are being spent.
