VERONA, Miss. (AP) - Two months after he was hired, Verona’s police chief has quit.
The Board of Aldermen made it impossible for him to do his job, Bill Johnson told WTVA-TV (https://bit.ly/1Cn8CQH ).
Johnson, who spent most of his career in federal law enforcement, said the board shot down everything he tried to do.
Mayor Robert Trice said Friday that he was surprised by the move. Chief Investigator J.B. Long says he was shocked.
Johnson told The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (https://bit.ly/1bWzYrC ) that Ward 3 Alderwoman Jessie Gilmore told him he’d be lucky to get two of the three officers he said he needed and insisted on seeing every application rather than the five he had chosen as finalists.
The board wouldn’t let him even listen to the interviews, and chose an applicant who couldn’t pass a background check and wouldn’t be able to carry a firearm, Johnson said.
Gilmore refused to comment about Johnson’s allegations.
“He resigned,” said Gilmore. “That’s all I can say. I have no other comment.”
Johnson said, “You hired a professional to run the police department, so let me run it.”
From the beginning, he said he and the board went back and forth on key issues such as pay raises, safety hazards and the need to hire new officers; nothing he wanted was approved.
“We have vehicles that were in dire repair; the board had problems with me getting them fixed,” he explained. “We haven’t given our officers their raises in years; the board had problems with me implementing those raises. Everything I tried to do, I faced backlash.”
The mayor said Johnson was doing a fine job, but doesn’t understand how things work in small towns.
“You need to learn small town politics before seeking office because every decision that’s made in the city, the board has to make,” Trice said.
Johnson said, “Now I see why I am the seventh chief in the last 11 years. I told them if they wanted a puppet, they needed to find someone else. I laid my badge and gun on the table and walked out.”
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