National League of Cities

Dewine let thousands among Ohio’s 32,000 cops make arrests with expired OPOTA credentials and has told no mayor

CLEVELAND, OH – Beaver Creek, Ohio police officer Sean Williams’ Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy (OPOTA) credentials expired on December 31, 2013. On January 1, 2014 he was  still discharging the duties of a law enforcement officer and carrying a weapon in violation of an unsuspended general law of the state that ordered him to stop.  Had Beaver Creek city manager Mike Cornell discharged the duties of that office Williams should have been terminated on January 1st of that year without any rights as an employee for voluntarily-surrendering his OPOTA credentials.  Instead, Beaver Creek police chief Dennis Evers continued to…

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19,429 mayors aren’t trained to supervise violent police

There are 19,429 mayors and city managers in the USA who could overnight eliminate 90 percent of the civil rights litigation and citizen complaints of police misconduct if they were trained to manage the approximately 350,000 police officers they supervise.  In a nation where the national average for training police is 600 hours – a barber and cosmetologist need 1500 hours – there is no voluntary or mandatory professional police management training for mayors and city managers. In Ohio where I served four years as East Cleveland’s mayor, and in the nation, mayors are codified as the chief law enforcement…

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