Former Piedmont police chief addresses city council

 

PIEDMONT – Former Piedmont Police Chief Freddie Norton addressed the Piedmont City Council at its regular meeting Tuesday evening.

Norton has been the subject of an investigation following complaints received in the form of letters to the council and mayor from several officers within the department. He abruptly retired from the department following 26-plus years.

Norton was placed on paid administrative leave in a special meeting called by the council on June 21. He has since been hired at the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office as a courthouse security officer.

“For the last two weeks, I’ve really thought about what I wanted to say tonight. There’s been a lot on my mind,” Norton began. “I decided to retire. It was the right thing to do.”

Norton then addressed several points of the investigation. His responses to some of the questions raised during the investigation are below:

On being mean to police officers:
“I’ll own being loud. I’m loud right now. I yell. I cuss. It happens in that police department. It’s a police department.”

On police officers looking to leave Piedmont:
“Leading into three or four officers were looking to leave at any minute, I knew two of those officers were looking to leave. They come to me. I knew they were looking to leave. They come talked to me about it. They weren’t looking to leave because of me. They were looking to leave because one wanted out and wanted betterment. It’s in the investigation.”

On recruiting police officers:
“If I’m doing a poor job of recruiting officers, then so is everybody else in the area. There are departments paying $50,000 a year to start that are needing police officers. It’s quality, not quantity ya’ll. Quality. Thirteen applications, six passed a basic background check. Zero showed up for physical fitness testing. I don’t know what else to do.”

On taking credit for reducing crime in Piedmont:
“That one puzzles me. I’ve stood before ya’ll and never one time have I taken sole credit. I’ve always said those men and women did that. We guided them in the way we wanted it done. They did it. They did that. They worked hard. They did that.”

On the police department building being in bad shape:
“That building was built in 1935 or 1936, somewhere in there. It burned in the 70s. The upstairs just burned. It leaks. It pours water. That building is not on me. That building is on the city. That’s the only way to correct that. I’ll give it to one of the councilmen. He did reach out to me about some things on that. I appreciate that. It’s still expensive. It’s going to be expensive.”

On not having a K9:
“I’m not sure what you know about the cost of a K9. It’s extremely expensive. When I took over as police chief, we had a K9. We had two K9s. Mine retired with me. Mine retired when I took over. There’s $150.00 in the K9 budget. A man was paying out of his pocket for dog food, medical bills, paying out of his pocket. There’s $150.00 in the budget. A good K9 is $20,000. My first K9 was $25,000, not counting me going and living in South Carolina for three weeks. That was in 2006. You don’t just go out and grab a K9. Nowhere does it say you have to have a K9 in your police department, but we had worked something out. We’ve been working on something for several months.”

On the police department’s budget:
“Not one time have I said anybody on this council wasn’t willing to help, on this group right here. After that morning (of the last election), I told people ‘We’ve got a pretty good group of councilmen. I’ve talked to some of them. They’re willing to spend some money. This is going to be a first for us.’ Leading up to that, bare bones budgets, stop spending money after August. I could go on and on. It wasn’t just the police department. That’s every department in the City of Piedmont. That’s the way we had to operate. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t easy. You can go back and look at my budgets. I never busted my budgets. My budgets always stayed in control. I never went over. I watched them. Did I talk to some of these folks about we’ve got to be careful right here? Yeah, I did. But I wanted to stay below that budget because that was what we were supposed to do as department heads in the City of Piedmont. We did that. It wasn’t me. We did that. The officers did that. I had a lot of them who were mindful of what was going on and they did that.”

On informants and search warrants:
“Every officer that came to me and gave me a name, I turned around and carried it to the investigations office. The investigations office turned around and made a phone call. I can’t tell you the number of times those guys were working with major crimes unit. They worked with them. Just because everybody in the building didn’t know what those guys were doing doesn’t mean things were going on. I can’t talk much about that because I don’t know where some of the cases still are. There are cases out there. The problem is major crimes are short-handed. Every department is short-handed. It’s tough. Television has ruined law enforcement when it comes to things like that. It’s ruined it. It’s absolutely ruined it. You can’t walk up and kick a door in. I worked a drug operation with (Interim Police Chief) Nathan Johnson back in 2011. Me and Nathan worked a lot when we weren’t on shift. We come in and worked. It took us a year to get 13 warrants, enough evidence to get 13 warrants. One whole year. Television has ruined that aspect.

“Those guys have done search warrants for the major crimes unit. I don’t know how many they did. I know they were about to do one one day and the guy moved at midnight. The search warrant is no longer any good. He moved at midnight. You can’t search where he moved to. You can only search where he sold the dope out of.”

On his goal of being the longest-tenured police chief in Piedmont:
“This one puzzled me when I was reading it. I had someone take a goal of mine and made it bad. I’ve said more than one time I wanted to be the longest-tenured police chief in the City of Piedmont. That was a goal of mine, yet it’s bad? It’s in these letters and it’s bad because I want to be the longest-tenured police chief in the City of Piedmont? How is that bad? I don’t know.”

On pitting employee against employee:
“I’ve got to be real careful on this one too. Employee A comes to me and says Employee B is fixing to beat up Employee C. It’s going to happen. It’s getting bad. So then I go to Employee 5, 6, and 7, and I bring them in and say ‘Hey, what’s going on? What is happening? What is causing these things?’ I get information. What happens when they walk out of there and start talking amongst themselves? I was trying to figure out what was going on in some situations. There’s more than that. I’m not going to pinpoint any of these folks. They worked hard.”

On unfair training:
“I just learned what this was about two or three days ago. We had an officer who text me periodically and said ‘Hey, I’m off this day. Can I go to this training?’ Sure. It’s free. Go. They text me ‘Hey, can I go to this two-day training? I’m off both of those days.’ I don’t care. Go. One officer was coming to me asking me all these questions. I sent that officer to a training. I did. I was fixing to send that officer to another training, but then I learned there’s a list of all these trainings this officer was wanting to go to that supposedly was left laying around. I didn’t know about these trainings that we were wanting to go to, but apparently the decision was made that I had approved all those trainings. I hadn’t. I hadn’t approved all those trainings. There’s a lot of great free training out there. I post training on the board, nobody goes. It’s there. It’s posted. We try to keep it up there where they can see it. When I get it, I try to put it up there. This particular officer was paying attention, going through everything they were supposed to be going through, watching it, looking at it, ‘Hey can I go to this?’ Yeah, you can go.”

On department rules and regulations:
“In our field training, when they are hired with us, one of the things they must do that is signed off by the training officer is read the rules and regulations. I encourage all of you to read the rules and regulations. I really do. I encourage you to read it. There are several in this department that can tell you right now they didn’t realize it until some of this stuff come up that they started looking through the rules and regulations, and every month in our department meeting, I was picking out a section in rules and regulations. Guess what we were doing? We were going over it. They didn’t know what I was doing because they probably weren’t paying attention to some of it. They had forgotten it, but I was going over it, making sure we knew what we were supposed to be doing at times. Maybe some of these things I should have done a better job at, making sure they knew some of these other things.”

On unfair treatment for officers being tardy:
“There’s 20-something employees in the police department when we’re full-staffed. They clock in. There’s 10 clock-ins and clock-outs on every time card. I don’t go through every time card and look at that. Usually when I knew when somebody was being tardy it’s because the supervisor or the OIC (officer in charge) on the shift came to me and said ‘Hey, Employee A is late.’ Like I said, I don’t look through those. It wasn’t unfair. Supposedly some people were being late and I wasn’t being told about it. Again, I guess I can take the blame. I should have been looking at the time cards better. That also goes back to supervision too.”

On officers lying:
“Here’s another one I’ve got to be careful with. We’re not going to lie. I would hope that the city council and the mayor would understand that if somebody is caught lying, there’s no way they can lie out of it, they continue to tell a lie, and they continue to tell a lie to fix the first lie. There needs to be discipline. There needs to be discipline for that. I hope that we can agree upon that. That’s what one of those things in the investigation – not in the letters, but that’s what one of those things in that investigation is dead about – is we lied. We continued to lie, continued to lie to me and another officer and a supervisor.”

On a subordinate mistreating a supervisor:
“The subordinate was written up. The supervisor was told the subordinate was written up. They were told that. It was a bad deal. I watched the body cam footage. It was bad. It was as bad on one as it was the other. It was bad. Extremely disappointing. I didn’t make the decision on my own. I had others sit down with me and watch it. We come to the same agreement. It was bad. The SOP is what it is. That’s our standard operating procedure. That’s what we do. If you tell me somebody else does it a different way, then probably you need to go to that department. That’s in that investigation. Ya’ll can look through it and see it. It’s in there.”

On drugs and tipping drug dealers:
“That one cut me deep, I’m going to tell you. I don’t know what ya’ll know. I’m going to put myself out here. I’m going to put my family out here, my own flesh and blood. I’m not about this game. I’m not into this. Just because Jimmy Lou, the local dope dealer, when you arrested them tells you that the chief is involved in the pill game, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. I’ve been told just about every officer in the department is involved in the pill game. I don’t believe that. I never have. I’ve been told that my entire career. Any police officer that’s not been told that another officer is involved in the drug game is lying to you when they tell you they’ve not been told that. This one was just a dig. That’s all this one was, a dig.”

On telling officers they would be fired and never work in law enforcement again:
“Yes I did. I did. I had several officers come to me. They said ‘Hey, you need to check so-and-so. I’m not real sure about some stuff they’re doing.’ I watched body cam footage. Body cam footage is great. It’s a great tool. I know Captain Johnson has already used body cam footage several times already himself. It’s a great tool. That body cam footage concerned me what those officers had told me. Our Fourth Amendment is what our Fourth Amendment is. You’re not going to work for me and violate that Fourth Amendment and violate it continuously, or come close to it. You’re not going to work for me. I’m friends with just about every chief in this area. They’re not going to let you work for them either. I said what I said. I can’t change that. I said that. I meant that. We can’t be out here violating people’s rights. It just can’t happen. Luckily, we fixed it in the middle of it on the two or three I watched. We fixed it before we got ourselves too deep. We didn’t do anything wrong wrong. We fixed it. And I applaud those officers. They caught it. They fixed it.”

On talks of a jail fight:
“I’m just going to read you something on that. Both jaws x-rayed. Sent to oral surgeon because excessive swelling was concerning to the dentist. Couldn’t put teeth together for over a week. Headache for five days. Four stitches. Received shot toradal shot on the fourth day because of neck and shoulder pain and stiffness. Tooth removed. The root was broke down in the jaw that caused infection. Recently had a knot removed from elbow, three years later. Black eye. That first part was me. That last part was the guy I was fighting.”

On if employees were directly contacted by the mayor or council regarding Norton:
“I hope you’ve read the final question and some of the answers on the final question. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I hope you’ve read it. That’s all I have to say about the final question. Read the final question. Look at some of the answers on that final question of your investigation.”

Norton concluded by thanking his family, friends, fellow officers and other members of the community.

“Piedmont’s full of great people,” he said. “I hope I did my job to the satisfaction of every citizen in this town. I know you can’t make everybody happy. I know that, but as long as they’re satisfied with the job I did, then I’m satisfied.”

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