Grand jury: Probe DeKalb spending
Citizen panel recommends changes to county operations
by Andy Phelan
andy@dekalbchamp.com
Addressing more than a dozen key local issues, a 26-member citizen grand jury this week recommended sweeping changes in the way DeKalb County is run and operated.
The March-April term of the grand jury weighed in on a number of significant topics, from low morale and high turnover within the police department, further investigations into no-bid purchasing by the CEO’s administration and the way the county informs the public when there are possible water contaminations.
The grand jury is separate from the special grand jury that looked into the DeKalb police-related shootings in which more than a dozen suspects were shot and killed by officers in 2006. One officer was also shot and killed in the line of duty that year.
Those findings, released in April after an 11-month investigation, called for District Attorney Gwen Keyes Fleming to open a criminal investigation into the county medical examiner’s office.
The March-April term grand jury that released this report is part of Fleming’s regularly called grand juries that meet every two months to review cases.
Among the recommendations made by the grand jury was that officers currently assigned to protect CEO Vernon Jones be reassigned to the Sheriff’s Office.
In the report, run as a public notice in The Champion’s legal notices, the citizen panel said officers assigned to the CEO’s “large entourage” that “allegedly protects” him, should be immediately reassigned to the sheriff to help with the serving of warrants.
The issue made headlines in 2003 when it was disclosed that the Vernon Jones’ administration spent more than $600,000 of taxpayer money on the CEO’s security detail. The situation led to then-police chief Eddie Moody’s ouster and a grand jury investigation.
According to Mikki Jones, spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, there are no sheriff’s deputies working in the CEO’s security detail. “We can’t afford to have any of our deputies working for the CEO, given the shortages especially in our field division,” she said.
Jones explained that law enforcement personnel who protect the CEO work for the Police Department, which is separate from the Sheriff’s Office.
A call placed to the CEO’s spokesperson for a response was not returned for this online report.
To address police morale, the grand jury report recommends “a reasonable increase in compensation for veteran officers,” and scolds leaders for “endless political clashes” over police pay increases. It recommends looking more closely at Commissioner Burrell Ellis’ plan to pay for the increase through budget cuts instead of “the all-too-frequent politician’s ‘remedy’ of raising taxes.”
It also recommended the reinstatement of Tasers and the purchase of dashboard cameras. The jury called the removal of Tasers from the department’s arsenal by elected officials “knee-jerk” that now “appears short-sighted and relatively foolish.”
For the first time it implied that if police officers had Tasers in 2006, the outcome “would have been different.”
Concerning the recent audits commissioners and the CEO conducted on “widespread violations” of county purchasing policy, the grand jury recommended a future “investigation of both piecemeal and no-bid purchasing practices of DeKalb County Executive Assistant Richard Stogner.”
It also recommended that the accounting firm KPMG LLP assist any future grand jury and encouraged a deeper investigation into the millions of dollars spent on professional services contracts and purchases since 2004 that ignored county procedure and lacked basic oversight.
Fleming had no comment on the grand jury report or its recommendations for future investigations.
For the full grand jury report, click here.
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