This afternoon, while I was busy firing off quips on the radio, actual news happened in Asheville. After a long search, the city announced that they had found a new Chief of Police – Greenville, North Carolina Police Chief William Anderson.

William Anderson is replacing the outgoing top cop Bill Hogan (who is no relation to Hulk Hogan), who retired under a swarm of rumors about missing guns, evidence and the department settling a Sexual Harassment lawsuit with a former employee. Anderson’s appointment to the Asheville Police Department is what the city hopes is the first step in rebuilding the tarnished image of their department.

These are admirable things for the city to do, and I hope that they can do it. After seeing firsthand how nasty the APD’s employees can be towards the citizens that they protect within the seemingly-private confines of the internet I truly hope that healing process can begin with between the department and the community.

With that being said, I wish that the city had done a simple Google search about our chief-to-be, Mr. Anderson.  According to numerous stories found on the internet, Anderson has a long history of causing disruption and controversy in his own departments, both in Greenville and at his previous job in Deland, Florida.

In 2001 while serving as Chief of Police in Deland, Florida, Anderson was reprimanded and forced to pay a fine for showing a lack of caution in a car accident that resulted in a damaged police vehicle and two people hurt. The couple had a few broken bones to show for the incident, and Anderson’s negligence cost the taxpayers of Deland $10,000 to replace the unmarked police car he was driving.

In late 2002, Anderson resigned amid charges of racism towards white officers and criticism of the department’s heavy-handed style of discipline.  None of these charges were ever brought to light in a court of law or in any official hearing, but there are a few newspaper articles written around the time of the Anderson’s resignation that illustrates Anderson presiding over a very frustrated and fractured department.

I want to stress that I don’t believe that Anderson’s history in Deland meana that he is going to come to Asheville and immediately fail. But I feel like the public deserves more from this story than just a hastily-rewritten press release that both local outlets have released as the story. From everything that I can find, Anderson’s record in Greenville (with the exception of the normal online petition with spurious charges of corruption that one would find for most public figures) seems like he performed his job adequately.

But Anderson’s time in Florida is the troubling thing to me. The thing is that even if Asheville asked about the driving incident and the charges of racism and that he let his own department get out of control, the city of Deland was legally obligated to not give a negative reference, according to this article: “The agreement stipulates that neither the city nor Anderson will make any ‘negative or disparaging statements’ toward each other.”  That’s the kicker. Asheville’s new police chief, who has been brought in to help the city repair the breaches of trust between law enforcement and the community, has a questionable background. Through legal protection the city wasn’t allowed to find out any of this unless they did their own digging.

I wish Anderson well in his new job. I hope that Asheville Police Department can become as awesome as the city they protect. But here, at the moment where they can say they are starting over to rebuild their relationship with the public, they’ve stumbled. Let’s hope for all of our sakes that this is a one-time thing and not the continuation of a long-standing tradition.

A thousand thanks to Twitter user @_tatuaje_ for digging up all of this information – I merely assembled it here. He did all of the heavy lifting.

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