Look into sheriff is way past due

First there was the movie. Is this the book? Last year, the Pine Bluff Commercial uncovered the beating of an inmate by a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy. Through a series of freedom of information requests, the paper gained multiple security camera videos and personnel documents showing the abusive mistreatment of an inmate who suffered numerous serious injuries.

You might assume the offending deputy would have been fired, but you’d only be half right. He was recommended to be fired and was fired briefly but Sheriff Lafayette Woods Jr. overruled the panel that had looked into the occurrences and reinstated the person. Why? The sheriff has never said.

It is worth noting that the same jailer had been fired before for similar behavior at another agency and that there had been other complaints. The term “bad apple” comes to mind. And yet, Woods kept him around.

Fast forward to today. In a recent grievance hearing, a terminated deputy recounted that others in the sheriff’s department have done far worse than he had and not only had they not been fired, they had not even been reprimanded.

Those incidents included allegations of a deputy being involved in a hit-and-run where the deputy was believed to have been inebriated. Take your pick: both are illegal. In another allegation, the fired deputy said another deputy did not offer assistance in an incident involving an infant that died.

In defense of the fired deputy, a former chief deputy who said he had conducted numerous internal investigations over the years, corroborated the fired deputy’s contention that other employees had committed more egregious acts and that nothing had happened to them. He had come to the hearing with a thick stack of documents he gained through several freedom of information requests — enough for a lengthy book, it appeared.

The chief deputy’s allegations, to name two, involved sheriff’s office employees who he said had lied on their timecards. In one case, a deputy got away with $30,000 in county pay for work not done.

“She was reporting that she was working mostly 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., but when I was tracking her she would come to work at 7 at the jail and leave at about 7:45 because she would go to comprehensive care,” the man said. “She would come back in the evening at about 5 o’clock and stay for about 30 to 45 minutes.”

As the former chief deputy said, nothing was ever done to try to recoup the money or reprimand the employee, even though the prosecuting attorney had recommended charges be filed.

Apparently, in a sheriff’s office run by Woods, beatings and thievery are fine if one is on the right side of the sheriff. That is, if these new allegations are indeed true.

Isn’t it about time that this agency was investigated? Way past time in our book.