gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- The September discovery that a desk officer had more than doubled her annual salary by collecting $62,583 in overtime rocked the Durham Police Department in 2009 and wound up costing the officer and a senior commander their jobs.
In the wake of the discovery, Officer Alesha Robinson-Taylor was fired and former Deputy Police Chief Beverly "B.J." Council was forced into retirement.
The ousters followed an audit report that found Council and other senior commanders in the department had "enabled" the officer's claims. Council personally approved most of Robinson-Taylor's overtime chits.
Officials hope next month to launch what City Manager Tom Bonfield termed a "fairly comprehensive leadership assessment" in the department that will bring in consultants to train people and help gauge who's worthy of promotion into upper-level command slots.
Council's replacement has yet to be named. An assistant chief, Jim Bjurstrom, has served as acting head of operations since she went on leave pending her Dec. 31 retirement.
City officials are also waiting on the outcome of a criminal probe by the State Bureau of Investigation and the N.C. attorney general's office.
Robinson-Taylor was in charge of coordinating the department's so-called "secondary employment" program for officers who moonlight in off-duty security jobs.
A review of the program that Police Chief Jose Lopez requested in early 2008 found that the moonlighting program was rife with favoritism and open to possible abuse.
Council and Robinson-Taylor, who at the time was backing up a colleague who was formally in charge of coordinating it, were among the officers who received an unusual number of assignments that hadn't been posted department-wide.
The scandal surfaced as the department's standing among Durhamites was appearing to have recovered from the hit it took following the 2006 Duke lacrosse case.
A late-summer survey commissioned by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau found that about 61 percent of the people it questioned agreed in some way that the department was doing a good job of protecting and serving residents.
That figure was up sharply from a 2007, post-lacrosse trough of 25 percent. But the survey was conducted shortly before the overtime scandal broke, Bonfield and visitors bureau Chief Operating Officer Shelly Green said.
