I Love The Internet!

The Internet - Just like going to the library, only cheaper!

For the past few months, I’ve been doing some internet research on the Fort Wayne Police Department. Basically, I began by searching the names of officers I know, or know of. As I check each name individually, whatever stories I find usually lead me to many other officers. I believe I now have the names of just about every current officer, as well as many former ones. Not being from Fort Wayne, I suppose that it should come as no surprise to find that I am discovering a lot of information that is new to me. I suppose some of this is old news to Fort Wayne/Allen County natives though.

For example, I did not know that the 911 consolidation idea has been going on for so long. In 1986, Fort Wayne Police Chief David Rieman proposed merging the city and county call centers. And earlier that same year, Allen County Sheriff Dan Figel actually called for a commission to study merging the city and county police departments entirely. Well, I guess these things take time, so it will probably be another twenty years or so before we get this accomplished.

I also found another interesting story that made me think back to when my home was fire-bombed by drug dealers in 2006. After FWPD Deputy Chief Nancy (Becher) Chamberlin laughed at me about this, refusing to allow me to deliver information about the attack to her department, and telling me I should quit causing trouble, I felt that my home and my property were in imminent danger. My situation became even more desperate after the Allen County Sheriff’s Department made it clear to me that they preferred to respect the jurisdictional boundaries of FWPD, which meant they did not intend to enforce the law in this part of their county.

After my complaint against her was summarily dismissed by the department’s office of non-professional standards (Internal Affairs,) I really felt my back was against the wall. So, in addition to sending my appeal of the dismissal to the Board of Public Safety, I also sent it to several other agencies as well. One of these was the Indiana State Police. I still have the letter that was sent as a reply. The person writing the letter complimented me for doing “all the right things” a person should do in my circumstances. He then went on to say that he knows Chief York and that he has confidence that FWPD can and will properly address the problems I was facing.

That letter was written by Paul Whitesell, superintendent of the Indiana State Police. I had always assumed that his knowledge of Chief York was only scant. It seems logical that the head of the state police would at least have some familiarity with the heads of the largest city police departments within his state. But after reading the article, it appears that there may be a much closer connection than I had assumed. Although the article does not say exactly what years Mr. Whitesell worked for FWPD, or in what capacity, a casual examination of both his and Chief York’s dossiers leads me to conclude that they probably did actually know each other pretty well.

So now I’m laughing, imaging what Mr. Whitesell was thinking when he read my letter. There’s a possibility that he knew exactly where my corner was, and that he knew I was not exaggerating about the problems here. He probably called Rusty up and shared a few laughs with him over the whole incident. Oh well, although the substance of his response was really not that much different than the others, at least he had the decency to write me a formal letter and to not laugh in my face about it.

And finally, the third article really amused me. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t picture Officer Russell York, out of uniform, and buying drugs on the streets. I always gave him just a small amount of consideration based upon the fact that someone as high up as him, and in an organization as complex as FWPD, probably can’t really know what is going on down on the ground. But the fact that he used to be an undercover narcotics officer changes all that. I’m sure things have changed a bit in the past couple of decades, but he probably knows enough from his past experiences to understand what I was dealing with here. And the lousy shit didn’t even have the decency to return my phone call or reply to my letter? - What a lousy bastard!

Well, that’s all for today. I’ll share more FWPD stories with you some other day, but for now, I have a lot of searching left to do.