CMPD Looks The Other Way

One of Charlotte's finest has apparently been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Seems one CMPD officer, we'll call him Officer Ripoff, had a pretty sweet secondary employment job providing security at the Greyhound bus station Uptown.

But apparently Officer Ripoff figured he was so good at being a cop he could work both his secondary job and his CMPD job at the same time. His multi-tasking or "double - dipping" by working the lucrative bus station job while on the clock at the expense of the city's taxpayers is of course wrong and also illegal. It is normally called theft. But apparently not at Chief Monroe's CMPD.

Officer Ripoff was assigned to CMPD POST/TRAP unit in an undercover capacity. Seems Officer Ripoff was allowed to dress as he wished so as to fit in with Charlotte's street thugs. His work with the POST/TRAP unit also gave him a wide latitude in his hours making the scam pretty easy to pull off.

Everything was rocking along nicely for Officer Ripoff until someone did the math and BINGO! Officer Ripoff is busted. Ripoff was brought to IA where he promptly tried to place the blame on his supervisor, Marc Robson.  Robson was later removed from the unit and sent to the airport.  Ripoff was removed from the unit and sent to third shift in central division.

While on the specialized unit Ripoff had grown a full beard as part of his assignment but he was told to shave it when he was sent back to uniform patrol. Officer Ripoff refused to shave the beard claiming he has recently converted to Islam and that as a Muslim was permitted to wear a beard.

So the department sent Ripoff back to his undercover POST/TRAP specialized unit, given his same hours and job as before, effectively voiding any punishment whatsoever.

Padding a time sheet or slacking off while being a Cop is nothing new, double dipping while rare has happened before. In fact several years ago under Chief Stevens a couple of wise guys thought they could get away with it.  But not only were the officers immediately cited for termination they were also charged criminally.

Cedar's Take: The water cooler talk about this has been going on for sometime. CP has withheld the officer's name and photo to protect his identity since he is still working in an undercover capacity.

It is interesting to note that Officer Ripoff is black and his supervisor Marc Robinson is white.

Cedar's Follow-Up: An earlier version of this blog post was removed due to "operator error".