KHOU 11 Investigates discovered more than half of the cops in the Coffee City Police Department had been suspended, demoted or fired from their previous jobs.
Quick excerpt,
Coffee City’s budget shows the town collected more than $1 million in court fines last year. That came from more than 5,100 citations officers wrote, the most in the state for a town its size according to the Texas Office of Court Administration.
But there is more to this story than a small town writing a bunch of speeding tickets. KHOU 11 Investigates discovered Coffee City is a magnet for troubled cops. More than half of the department’s 50 officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs, according to personnel files obtained through open records requests to other law enforcement agencies.
Those prior disciplinary actions range from excessive force, public drunkenness, untruthfulness and association with known criminals. They include:
- An officer terminated for posting a Facebook message to a citizen: “You should kill yourself, do the world a favor.”
- An officer suspended for smashing a window and entering his girlfriend’s home without consent.
- A deputy constable suspended after a burglary victim’s laptop computer was found in his home.
- A deputy constable terminated for tackling a non-resisting citizen to the ground during a traffic stop.
- A deputy sheriff terminated for slapping a handcuffed inmate without provocation.
- Two officers terminated for lying on their job applications.
Because only 12 of the 50 are full time. The rest are reserves that are used as surge for events and stuff in other cities.
They don’t even have to work that hard. Figure nine officers working full-time 240 days a year. Have to write between 2 and 3 tickets a day to get to 5100 tickets a year.
The rest of these reservists are reserves on the books to do fine collection, some of them from Houston 3 hours away. They also can accept traffic details and security details and working for private contractors and apartment complexes.
Now 12 officers full-time splitting a million dollars comes out to 83,000 an officer, and I suspect that still isn’t enough with benefits. So I’m not sure that we have the whole store here or not, as much as this story already stinks.