By Jacob Quinn Sanders
Arkansas Democrat Gazette
The Mississippi County sheriff’s office hired Nathan Taylor in May as an auxiliary police officer not knowing he had been charged with second-degree murder and acquitted — also in Mississippi County — in 2000.
The sheriff’s office also did not know that Taylor, 31, admitted during the investigation to using methamphetamine, something he failed to acknowledge on his application.
The information was easy enough to find. The state Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training turned it up the same month after a routine check of the Arkansas Crime Information Center’s database after receiving Mississippi County’s paperwork on Taylor’s hiring.
But many small agencies have trouble performing background checks on new hires, standards commission Deputy Director Brian Marshall said. They don’t have the resources, he said, and often have officers who are tasked with other duties fit the checks in during down time. And those officers, he said, are often unaware of an Arkansas law requiring them to check with the standards commission as part of any background check.
To combat the issue, Marshall will soon add language to the standard initial law-enforcement hiring form, called an F-1, reminding agencies statewide of Arkansas Code Annotated 12-9-602. A subsection of that law mandates contacting the commission before making any hire that requires a state law-enforcement certification.
He described it as a superficial change, more of a service than an admonishment.
“In a smaller city, a mayor might be doing the background check himself on a new police chief or something like that and might not know about this law,” Marshall said. “In other circumstances, the officers doing the checks sometimes just don’t have the right training and so aren’t aware they have to take this step.” Marshall said he notifies agencies of information that might disqualify a potential new officer a couple of times a month.
“The folks in Mississippi County, for example, had no idea about this until we told them,” he said. “The captain I talked to was very, very thankful.” In Taylor’s case, the Mississippi County sheriff’s office fired him June 4 after finding that he made false statements on his application, records show. The sheriff ’s office recommended stripping Taylor of his certification, and the standards commission voted Thursday to hold a hearing on the matter.
Sheriff Leroy Meadows did not return a telephone message.
Sherwood Police Chief Kel Nicholson, a member of the standards commission, said thorough background checks were not open to compromise.
“It’s a burden, absolutely, but it needs to be done,” he said. “One of the ways we keep our communities safe is to make sure we’re hiring the best people we can.” Larger agencies such as the Little Rock Police Department have officers assigned specifically to perform background investigations, Marshall said.
But there are no guarantees an agency is getting all the necessary information.
When former Perry County Sheriff Ray L. Byrd was considering hiring a former Russellville police officer in 1997, he said, Russellville police failed to tell him the officer had severe emotional problems that led them to place him on a suicide watch for three consecutive shifts.
“The only thing they shared with us was that he could be pretty standoffish at times,” Byrd said in a telephone interview.
Byrd hired the officer as a deputy. Five years later, after having demoted him once, Byrd fired him after the deputy made a copy at home of a sex tape that had been stored as evidence. Byrd began to learn of the deputy’s emotional problems only after he went to the deputy’s home to fire him.
“I had to physically pry the man from around my legs,” Byrd wrote in a letter to the standards commission at the time.
Only at the deputy’s decertification hearing — six years after hiring him — did he learn of the problems in Russellville.
“I know we in this business don’t like to say something bad about a fellow officer,” Byrd said in an interview, “but sometimes there are just things people need to know. I have no idea why nobody told me about him.” At least Byrd asked the right questions, Marshall said.
“Not everybody checks,” he said. “And that’s the situation we’re trying to remedy.”
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