State commission votes to reactivate Hughes Police Department

EAST CAMDEN — A state commission on Thursday morning voted to reactivate the Hughes Police Department after the department’s authority was revoked over required records that it failed to submit for nearly a year.

A former police chief failed to update a roster of officers kept by the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training for certification purposes starting around May 2023, Hughes Mayor Lincoln Barnett told the board.

But Barnett said he didn’t learn about the department’s inactive status until April 10, when he was notified by the commission.

“If anyone is currently working as a Hughes Police Department Police Officer, they need to stop immediately,” wrote commission Deputy Director Eric Wacaster in an April 10 email to Barnett. “They do not have any law enforcement authority or jurisdiction until your agency is approved by the Commission to regain active status.”

Since then, Barnett said the department’s three officers have been working in a solely civilian capacity.

In a separate email the same day to state Department of Public Safety staff, including Col. Mike Hagar, the department’s secretary, who is also director of the Arkansas State Police, commission Director Chris Chapmond outlined the situation.

“The Hughes Police Department has been designated as inactive,” Chapmond wrote. “They have had officers working for the last year that have not been added to a ‘roster’ and effectively been working without statutory authority.”

Thursday, Barnett appeared to primarily blame former Chief Cortez Bowers, who resigned April 3, for the error, even though he said Bowers was not hired until July 2023.

Since April 10, Barnett said he’d worked with the commission to provide the

necessary paperwork to get the department reactivated so the officers could resume working as police, he said.

That process is much the same as the one that occurs when a new law enforcement agency is created, Wacaster told the board Thursday.

Compounding the former chief’s errors, Barnett said, is the fact that a new police administration clerk did not have access to the standards and training commission’s online portal.

Without access through the clerk, Barnett was not able to view the roster and see that it was incomplete, the mayor said.

Barnett chose not to run for re-election in 2022 after his first term, he said, but was appointed to the role again after his successor ran unopposed and then resigned about a week after taking office. A clerk employed by Barnett previously had access to the online portal, providing redundancy, but those credentials were not passed on to the new clerk, he said.

Wacaster told the board that the three officers’ paperwork appeared to meet the commission’s standards, but that they were not able to finish processing the documents until the department was reactivated.

During an April 19 visit to Hughes, Wacaster stressed to Barnett the importance of having redundancy in the city government to avoid this sort of oversight in the future.

Wacaster said he couldn’t comment on what would come of the arrests made by Hughes police during the period where they were operating without state authority.

A message left with the St. Francis County prosecutor’s office asking about those arrests was not returned Thursday.

The St. Francis County sheriff’s office provides some policing support to the city of 1,056 people, Barnett said, but because the city is isolated in the eastern part of the county, it can be difficult for the deputies to respond quickly.

“We have not had any major crimes in terms of murders or anything like that, but you do have thefts and fighting and domestic situations, so law enforcement is definitely needed,” Barnett told the board Thursday.

Doc Holladay, the commission’s chairman, told Barnett it was “imperative” that Barnett take the necessary steps to get the department back on track and prevent it from having to come before the commission again for the same issue.

The city’s Police Department was previously declared inactive from January to March of 2019, Barnett told the board members when asked about previous issues, although he didn’t say exactly why. A review by the state commission at the time advised the department hire more staff, Barnett said.

Bowers’ resignation came one day before Hughes resident Corey Weems accused Bowers of confronting him at the mayor’s office following a monthslong dispute between Weems and the chief following a Dec. 29 traffic stop, Memphis TV news station WREG reported last month .