An Ohio police chief has been fired after the mayor of a small town accused him of a raft of violations, which included her smelling marijuana in his office.
Chief Harold Webb was asked to take a drugs test at the request of Mayor Jewell Hayes-Hensley of New Miami Village in Butler County, but he refused and suggested that the act was degrading.
New Miami Village Council unanimously voted to terminate Chief Webb on June 27.
The town’s mayor, with a population of 2,200 has since gone public to spell out a long list of alleged violations committed by the fired chief.
Her claims include 911 emergency calls being ignored and the theft of hot dogs from a local gas station, when only free soda drinks were permitted while on duty.
Hayes-Hensley also accused Webb of ‘theft in office’ by fabricating timesheets, ‘cashing his paycheck knowing he was required to show proof of his being at work.’
Hayes-Hensley became suspicious that the chief had been stating that he had been working, when in actual fact he was not on shift at the police station.
At the start of June, the chief stated he had worked 48 hours in a single week yet had only been seen on duty for two days out of seven.
Upon closer inspection, Webb had only ‘logged in for service’ for one of the days of the week.
The mayor then asked for video evidence of the chief being on the job, but none was forthcoming. Webb also works full-time for the U.S. Postal Service.
It was when Hayes-Hensley paid a visit to the police department to collect the chief’s daily time logs that she noticed the smell of marijuana.
‘The first thing that came out of my mouth was who has been smoking weed in here. The smell of marijuana could knock you off your feet,’ she wrote in lengthy and descriptive five page letter detailing her allegations.
Webb, who had only been in the role for a year, explained the stench as coming from a raid in March in which more than 850 grams of marijuana flower was seized.
A letter was then hand-delivered to the police chief’s home notifying him that he needed to take a drugs test.
Webb refused noting that he felt degraded after being told that he would have to take the test in front of a nurse as a witness.
‘You know what you win. This is the third time you have questioned my integrity,’ Webb texted the mayor, adding that he would be resigning ‘this evening.’
‘Do you understand how belittling it is to have someone watch me urinate? Also, the reason my office had an overwhelming smell of marijuana is that there is over 850 grams of flower marijuana from the search warrant off Reiff Drive in March.
‘Sorry things didn’t work out for us,’ he wrote. ‘Hopefully, you can continue to move the village forward.’
Despite offering to resign, Webb never submitted his resignation letter leaving the New Miami Village council no choice but to fire him.
In a statement, Mayor Hensley wrote: ‘It is my job to ensure the residents of our community are safe. My goal is to turn our village around and make it a safe and thriving community for all.
‘Council and I are working very hard to have a greater police presence in our village and do a major cleanup both with crime and housing. It is time that residents of the village of New Miami know they have a mayor and council working to put the community’s needs first and do everything within their power to make the village of New Miami a safe, clean, and thriving community.’
During his short time in the role, Webb had already had a run-in with the mayor and had been placed on administrative leave without pay after he appeared to mishandle the police department’s Facebook page.
Hensley said the chief had allowed inappropriate comments to be posted on the message board including from his own wife. Ultimately the Facebook page was taken down.
‘We will not use a village site to tear our village down,’ Hensley stated at the time, in April this year.
After Webb was reinstated following his suspension, other grievances were filed against him including some village employees but it was only a matter of months before the chief was finally fired.
‘Chief has decades of experience in law enforcement. He’s never been disciplined before, nothing to this magnitude. His officers love him,’ Webb’s lawyer, Jeff Gray told Fox 19 earlier in the year.
‘They are willing to stick up for him. I think that speaks a lot about his character.’
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