Posted on 06/22/2002 5:13:22 AM PDT by jordan8
DELAND --
A year ago, when TaShawn Woulard lied on an application and during a polygraph test about smoking pot and selling crack cocaine, the police department thanked her for her interest in becoming a police officer and sent her on her way.
Today, she's headed for the police academy, her tuition paid with a federal grant and her candidacy backed by the DeLand Police Department.
DeLand Police Chief William Anderson said Woulard made some "mistakes" as a youth and when she was being hired, and said he doesn't think she intended to mislead.
Anderson said Tuesday that after seeing Woulard work as a community-service aide at the department's front desk, he decided she would again be considered a police officer candidate, despite any past incidents.
"She has come to work here and shown that she is a dedicated employee," Anderson said. "When she first applied, the very first time, she was a candidate for the Weed and Seed. It was understood that if she performed well . . . she would be considered as a candidate again."
Officials in other departments, however, wonder whether a job candidate who not only admits being involved with a powerful and addictive drug like crack cocaine, but then compounds that by falsifying a job application, is suited for police work.
Lt. Pam Miller, the Orlando Police Department's recruiting commander, said the department will not hire anyone who has dealt narcotics, regardless of arrests or convictions.
"We've had incidents where [potential] recruits said they had dealt when they were 12 years old," she said. "We will not hire them."
The Police Foundation, a law enforcement think tank in Washington, D.C., disagrees with hiring a police officer who admits to lying on a application and to having dealt in narcotics.
"We just shouldn't take that gamble with the public," said Karen Amendola, a police-integrity researcher with the foundation. "There are plenty of people out there with a clean background."
Woulard could not be reached Tuesday. She has an unpublished telephone number and was not home Tuesday evening.
Officer tried to block hiring
Woulard first applied to the DeLand's department last year. According to a department memo, the detective who investigated her background recommended against hiring Woulard after he discovered she had not been truthful about her past.
Woulard, 31, had checked "no" on a section of the application asking if she had ever tried marijuana or other drugs. Then, during a routine polygraph exam, she repeated the lie, according to the memo written by DeLand Detective Rod Hancock.
When the polygraph indicated she was being deceptive, the operator questioned Woulard, who admitted she used and sold pot in 1984 when she was 13 and, in 1989, when she was 18, sold crack twice, and sold and smoked pot, according to the June 11, 2001, memo. She has never been arrested or charged with any drug-related crimes, according to Florida Department of Law Enforcement records.
According to Hancock's memo, Woulard told him that she did not want to be disqualified for something that happened so long ago.
Discrimination suit filed
After she was rejected for that job, Woulard was hired in November 2001 as a civilian employee working at the front desk, taking reports on minor incidents such as noise complaints. Anderson said that a city hiring panel ranked her as the No. 1 candidate for the job, based on her interview and her previous work history with the clerk of courts and with the school system as a teaching assistant.
Her hiring led to a discrimination complaint filed with the Florida Commission on Human Rights by three of the department's dispatchers, who claim they were overlooked for the job because they are white. Woulard is black.
The circumstances surrounding Woulard's selection for the police academy do not violate any state-established standards for law enforcement officers, said FDLE spokeswoman Jennifer McCord.
The federal money for Volusia County's Weed & Seed program in DeLand -- designed to boost impoverished neighborhoods through job training and by eliminating gang and drug activity -- also does not come with any restrictions that would prevent Woulard from attending the academy next month.
Erin Blackwell, a spokeswoman for the Volusia County Weed and Seed Steering Committee, said that by accepting the grant, the department agreed to use the money for a job-training program for residents of DeLand's Spring Hill neighborhood, a low-income, primarily black area that has been targeted for the clean-up effort.
The guidelines state that a job applicant who has lied on an application can be rejected, though that isn't required.
Richard McKay of the Orlando Sentinel staff contributed to this article.
Next...
Arson does not block man from fire department.
Child molestation does not block man from job as Santa at department store.
Flunking out of high school does not block homeless man from job as public school teacher.
I'm pretty sure this has already happened.
That is the most miserable place I have ever been in Florida (in 34 years of living here). The city's motto should be "You name it and we don't have it".
To top it off,my mother-in-law lives there. The town is just about as corrupt as it is possible to be.
Try Child molestation does not block man from job as a Catholic Priest.................
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