Former Compton Mayor Being Retried for Corruption Points to Corruption in Former Compton Police Department
Omar Bradley says he took on the police department and, even though it was disbanded, the police won
Omar Bradley was the mayor of Compton from 1993 to 2001. He lost in 2001 to Eric Perrodin, a former police officer and deputy district attorney, and in 2004 Bradley was convicted of misappropriating public funds. He served a three year sentence in prison and a halfway home, and then last summer an appeals court overturned his conviction, ruling it hadn't been proven he meant to break the law.
Now, Bradley suggests in the Los Angeles Wave that his prosecution was in response to his attempts to "take on" the Compton Police Department (which was disbanded in 2000):
According to a 95-page report of a confidential investigation conducted by the Internal Affairs Division… issued on Nov. 4, 1999 under the title of "Investigation of Missing Narcotics from the Narcotics Vault," Bradley said he had no choice but to disband the city's police force and contract with the County Sheriff's Department for law enforcement services in Compton.
Mayor Bradley said he ordered the investigation by Internal Affairs because a Long Beach police officer, Bryant Watts, was shot by a gun that was later found to have been in the possession of the Compton police. While the investigation originally focused on the inventory of guns at the Compton Police Department, it quickly refocused on missing drugs, such as cocaine, PCP and marijuana that should have been destroyed at a Long Beach Burn Station…
The report singles out a specific case in which 60 kilos of cocaine had been seized by the Compton police in 1992, as well as property such as cars, motor homes, vans and other valuables.
However, upon rejection of the cases by the district attorney, the properties were kept by the Compton Police Department. Moreover, the report states: "the drugs that were seized cannot be produced and their destruction was never recorded by any official Burn Station. However, court papers ordering the destruction of these drugs were indeed found." (So, where did the dope go?)What the investigators noted as even more shocking is that when the Compton Police's Internal Affairs Division forwarded a case regarding these matters to the district attorney against then-Compton Police Chief Hourey Taylor — whose locker they said contained two kilos of the missing 60 kilos taken from the 1992 drug bust — the case was rejected by Deputy D.A. Kerry White. This is the same deputy D.A. who prosecuted Bradley…
According to page 49 of the report, Taylor told the investigators that the 60 kilos of dope were turned over to the FBI. The FBI told investigators they had no record of it. The investigation report includes copies of the logs which people must sign before they enter the Compton Police Department's narcotics vault. It shows that Chief Taylor entered the vault 2,700 times between 1992 when the drugs went into it and 1999 when they were reported missing. It also shows that Percy Perrodin, Mayor Eric Perrodin's brother and a former Compton Police Department captain whom the mayor wants to lead the Compton Police Department he so desperately tried to reinstate, signed into the vault on pages 44 and 45.
The background and the rest of the allegations here.
