The mayor of Hanceville placed the entire police force on administrative leave last week after a grand jury indicted four officers and the police chief on a variety of charges that included accusations of mishandling or removing evidence from the department’s evidence room.
But city clerk Tania Wilcox said she complained about separate corruption allegations in the police department to the county five months before the dispatcher died of an overdose.
Many attendees on Thursday said they hoped the department would be restaffed, and expressed concerns about how public safety would be impacted without a local department.
As a small Alabama city weighs whether to disband its police department accused of having a “rampant culture of corruption,” residents are split over how to weigh the need for public safety against longstanding misconduct.
Wilcox said that police “did everything they possibly could” to keep the city council “from getting any information” about the dispatcher's death.
