Sheriff: Office will move on after jail resignations

• Sheriff says the recent jail resignations are a sad reality%2C but the office will move forward.
• The sheriff's office will likely purchase an electronic system to monitor jail rounds in the future.
• Sheriff refutes claim that inaccurate logs are a common practice.

NEWARK – There are two messages Sheriff Randy Thorp hopes to convey after a recent series of resignations related to falsified jail logs:

To the Licking County community: The sheriff's office can be trusted.

To Licking County Sheriff's Office employees: Poor work performance will not be tolerated.

"It's not a happy story, but that's reality," Thorp said after five jail employees resigned following an investigation into inaccurate logs.

Thorp said he doesn't believe the employees were trying to be manipulative, but he said they at least did not follow protocol.

"It was a serious performance issue, and it's one that we could not tolerate and will not tolerate," he said. "When we are faced with things like this, we don't kick it under the rug. We don't try to hide it. We deal with it, deal with it appropriately and move forward."

To help prevent future incidents, the sheriff's office is planning to buy an electronic monitoring system that will track rounds via checkpoints. That system — which likely will cost between $10,000 and $15,000 — hopefully will be in place within a month or two, Thorp said. It was something the sheriff's office was already looking into, he said, but this situation gives it urgency.

Investigation

Corrections officers Toby Berry, Jeremiah Moore, Eric Finley and Aubrey Biller and Deputy Tamra Leonard resigned in late July. All five worked in the jail. Leonard's title is different because she was hired in 2002, before the sheriff's office started hiring corrections officers rather than sworn deputies to work in the jail.

Pay ranged from Moore's $18.73 per hour, the starting pay for corrections officers, to Leonard's $25.09 per hour, according to personnel files.

The log situation came to light after an inmate committed suicide in May. Capt. Dave Starling and Detective Sgt. Brock Harmon investigated, and they found the logs completed by the officers didn't match what video surveillance showed.

From video recorded May 8, for example, Starling noted 13 instances in which Leonard logged rounds as being done but, according to the video, either didn't make the rounds at all or or didn't do them completely.

There were similar discrepancies from other days and with each of the officers who resigned.

Thorp wouldn't go as far as to say the employees definitely would have been fired had they not resigned, but as the investigation progressed, "termination was more than likely imminent," he said, adding that with resignations, there is no chance for any appeals.

"The main objective as far as the organization is concerned is ending that relationship," he said. "If that comes in the form of a resignation, that's fine. If it comes in the form of termination, that's fine."

Common practice?

Jail officers are supposed to make rounds roughly every 30 minutes. They are supposed to check on each cell and inmate, to make sure everyone is alive, well and where they're supposed to be.

Starling and Harmon interviewed each of the now-resigned officers as part of their investigation, and ultimately, each admitted to conducting rounds improperly. However, each also said it was common practice.

Berry told Harmon he was trained — although he said "he could not remember who taught him this was acceptable" — that if an officer went into a module for anything, it could count as an area check.

"If you ran up toilet paper to some dude up there, you just mark it as an area check (for the entire segregation area)," Berry said, according to the report.

Harmon asked if that was true according to policy, and Berry replied, "Technically no."

"C.O. Berry said again this was a common practice among employees. C.O. Berry continued, saying the entire second shift performs area checks this way."

Thorp refuted that claim. Each of the now-resigned employees admitted they were not doing checks as they were trained, and other employees interviewed are doing rounds and checks the proper way, he said.

"You do your rounds, and you log them accurately," he said. "To log activity that you don't do is epically wrong, obviously a violation of the policy."

Criminal?

In some cases, falsifying jail logs could be considered a criminal offense. However, prosecutors would have to prove it was done intentionally — "knowingly false" — rather than deputies simply forgetting or maybe being trained improperly, said Licking County Prosecutor Ken Oswalt.

In this case, Oswalt talked with Thorp, and there doesn't seem to be that proof, Oswalt said.

"It might be a competence issue," but at least at this point, it's not a criminal one, he said. "You get busy, and you forget."

Other than Leonard, each of the employees who resigned had been with the sheriff's office less than two years. Personnel files — though slim for four of the five — show largely positive performance reviews and few disciplinary actions.

Finley was reprimanded in 2013 for showing up an hour late to a mandatory class, and Leonard had several reprimands throughout the years for activities such as playing cards on an intake computer, playing cards with inmates and not immediately reporting a physical confrontation between two inmates, records show.

"Other than this situation, to all appearances, they were good employees," Thorp said. "It's disappointing on a number of levels, but it's also disappointing for the employees that left."

hsparling@newarkadvocate.com

740-328-8822

Twitter: @hksparling