Police chief gets deal

One of the causes for there being a cesspool of incompetence and dangerous dereliction inside the village of Put-in-Bay's police department is a penchant for covert deception, and a tolerance of that. The latest symptom of that disease is the announcement this week that police Chief Steve Riddle will retire at the end of the year and get a $36,000 pay check to walk away, in the form of a consultant's contract. Riddle Not bad. Not bad, if you're Steve Riddle and you've been on the job just since 2017 with little or no practical experience to manage a law enforcement agency, and no apparent success at doing it. In fact, for the last six months Riddle has been benched, sidelined with a suspension since June after officers under his command targeted minorities in a traffic stop that was disgraceful and narrowly avoided a disastrous outcome. Viewing the available body cam video from the cameras officers were wearing when that incident happened suggests the only reason the traffic stop did not turn deadly is because the "suspects" encouraged each other to remain calm as it began to get out of control. The officers were not heroes in that incident, or in another racially charged incident on the island a few weeks earlier, it was the people who were stopped. Within days all charges against the men and women of color visiting the island that day were dropped and an investigation was ordered to determine if police racially profiled them before initiating the traffic stop. The FBI, also, was duty bound to investigate and determine if that was the case since to do so would be a federal violation of the civil rights guaranteed to all Americans. Here we are six months later, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in typical fashion, refuses to release any information about its findings. That's a sore spot with us, as it is with any watchdog organization, that the FBI is accountable to ... apparently nobody. But worse than that, local officials refuse to say what was determined after months of investigating and review — all at taxpayer expense. Instead of transparency the public gets lip service, and an announcement about an agreement designed to avoid litigation between the village and the sidelined police chief. That, in our view, is covert deception and it does not serve the interests of the public — en masse — and particularly for people of color who are the ones victimized by poorly led public agencies like the Put-in-Bay police department. A lawyer for the village said the report that determined if there was racial profiling is being withheld because it is part of trial preparation records. Records, in our view, don't change from one period in time to the next, and a civil rights trial or a wrongful termination lawsuit, either or both, are public events. The village's lawyer, the mayor and council that is going along with that shabby excuse for deception, are as much part of the problem as Riddle, and they aren't deserving of a severance package, either.