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| NEWS > 25 January 2007 |
Other related articles:
New Police Commissioner named
The Police Minister today announced a new Police Commissioner.
He is Howard Broad, who has served as an Assistant Commissioner since 2004.
He replaces Acting Commissioner Steve Long, who has been filling the top job since the retirement in December of Rob Robinson, who held the post for six years.
His carerr of many than 30 years, included a period as Auckland District Commander and a secondment in 2003 to the Police Standards Unit in the UK Home Office.
Police Minister Annette King says Commissioner Broad will be responsible for, among other things: rewriti... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Chicago Daily Southtown - Chic
25 January 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Harvey Police Department, IL
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Authorities raid Harvey police
Cook County sheriff's investigators and Illinois State Police raided the Harvey police station Wednesday, truck in tow, to collect files and other evidence in homicide cases dating back five years.
Prosecutors and state police were seeking evidence related to unsolved gang crimes and murders, sources close to the investigation said.
A number of reports involving homicides, aggravated batteries and other "crimes against persons" were taken from the station, a Harvey police source said.
About nine investigators took forensic evidence, such as bullet fragments, that were collected at crime scenes and have been stored in the Harvey police evidence lockup, as well as old police reports, sources said. They also gutted computers from the detectives' division, the traffic division, special operations and the chief's office, including the chief's spokeswoman.
Investigators also seized information from personal laptops belonging to Archie Stallworth, a police director, and assistant police Cmdr. Lemuel Askew, loading everything into a plain white moving-style truck marked with a cardboard sign in the dashboard, reading "State's Attorney's Office."
The raid was not part of any public corruption investigation, sources said. But prosecutors are trying to find out, in part, why Harvey police have not brought charges in some of these cases.
Harvey, a city of about 30,000, has had dozens of unsolved murders in past years, solving none of the nine murders that occurred in 2005, and only two of last year's 11 murders. The city known as the murder capital of the Southland likely marked its third 2007 murder Wednesday in as many weeks, when a Gary man, bound and gagged, plummeted to his death from a third-story Harvey apartment.
Prosecutors decided to raid the Harvey Police Department after going through files seized last year in an ongoing probe of the office by the state's attorney and state police joint public integrity task force.
Last year, prosecutors charged Harvey police Detective Hollis Dorrough with deliberately returning a gun seized as evidence to its owner, a convicted felon who was later arrested for murder. Prosecutors said Dorrough did that on orders from "Official A," later identified as Mayor Eric Kellogg. The gun was later recovered as part of an intensive search by area law enforcement.
Kellogg has not been charged with wrongdoing and has denied any involvement in the missing gun.
The mayor released a written statement Wednesday denouncing "police misconduct."
"I stand in full support of the investigation and pledge full cooperation with the matter," he wrote. "As I have always stated, if there is any findings of misconduct of any of our officers or employees, I will push for the immediate termination of the individual or individuals involved. Corruption and police misconduct is not and will not be tolerated by any means."
State police seized files and other evidence from Dorrough's desk during their investigation last year, and sources said Wednesday that information in those files concerned other violent crimes in Harvey that have never resulted in charges.
Prosecutors decided it was necessary to probe those cases themselves, sources said.
"These crimes might be linked to other crimes that we're looking into," one source said. "We're trying to figure out why they haven't been investigated."
U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd), of Chicago, last summer called for outside help for Harvey's beleaguered police department from Illinois State Police and Cook County sheriff's police, but his plea went unheeded.
"Now, it appears that the state and county authorities feel compelled to look into Harvey police operations on their own. It's a sad day when police departments have to police other police departments, but in this case, I embrace and welcome it," he said in a statement Wednesday.
"The law-abiding citizens and officers who honor the badge need to be protected, while the officers who fail to honor it need to be exposed and prosecuted. Mayor Kellogg must be held personally responsible for today's events, which were completely avoidable," Jackson said.
The raid was welcomed by former Harvey resident Angela Sartin. Her 17-year-old son Pierre was fatally stabbed inside a Harvey currency exchange in August 2005. Prosecutors declined to file murder charges against the teen offender, saying the stabbing was self-defense, something the mother denies.
Sartin said the raid coupled with recent reports of alleged wrongdoing within the police department made her take notice.
"Had this happened in (Chicago), they would have locked (the offender) up and made him prove the stabbing was self-defense," Sartin said.
Though the probe wasn't tied directly to uprooting public corruption, several of Harvey's six mayoral hopefuls turned up outside the police station to denounce the Kellogg administration.
Anthony McCaskill called for the mayor's immediate resignation.
Park district commissioner Brenda Thompson said, "I don't know how much more Harvey can take."
And Marion Beck, a former police administrator, said evidence problems began in 2003 -- when Kellogg was elected. "Our current mayor has single-handedly taken away the integrity of this department in three years," she said. "We don't have trained detectives, and that's obvious by the number of crimes that have gone unsolved."
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