[*Anya*]

Forced out over sex, drugs and other infractions, fired officers find work in other departments

By Kimbriell Kelly, Wesley Lowery and Steven Rich December 22, 2017

NEW ORLEANS — By the time the New Orleans Police Department fired Carey Dykes, the officer had been sued for alleged brutality, accused of having sex with a prostitute while on duty and caught sleeping in his patrol car instead of responding to a shooting.

The 13-year veteran fought to get his job back but lost.

Even so, he returned to patrol months later — working for a nearby police department.

Dykes is one of dozens of officers forced out of the New Orleans department over the past decade for misconduct who were given badges and guns by other departments, according to a Washington Post analysis of state and city employment records, police personnel files and court documents. At a time of increased scrutiny of police nationwide, the ease with which fired or forced out New Orleans officers found work at new departments underscores the broader challenge that law enforcement faces to rid itself of “bad apples.”

The New Orleans department has long been attempting to reform its ranks and shed a troubled past. In the past decade, the department has fired or otherwise pushed out at least 248 officers. Of those forced out, 53 have been hired by other police departments, according to information obtained through public records requests.

Many of those officers landed at smaller police departments in nearby parishes and colleges — some hired weeks or months after leaving New Orleans. While records show that some have had no complaints of misconduct since joining new departments, others have been fired again.

Records show that many of the 53 officers hired by other departments disclosed their troubled departures from New Orleans. About half of the 53 had been fired, and the rest resigned in lieu of being fired or quit while under investigation

Some of the 248 officers were fired or forced out in New Orleans after abandoning their posts in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck the city. Others were fired or pushed out in the aftermath of a 2011 Department of Justice civil rights investigation. The federal review concluded that officers “routinely” used unnecessary force and conducted unlawful arrests, and that neither the public nor officers had faith in the department’s disciplinary process. City leaders instituted reforms demanded by Justice, adding to an exodus of officers.

Former New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said that sheriffs and other chiefs often justify rehiring officers by dismissing their problems as “political.” As a result, troubled officers remain in policing, he said.

“By the time you reach the point of terminating someone, that’s usually something that speaks to [the officer’s] ethics or ability to perform their job,” said Serpas, who led the New Orleans department from 2010 to 2014.

Louisiana is one of 44 states that require that officers be certified, or licensed. In some states, police chiefs pursue the decertification of officers they fire — to prevent them from being hired at other police departments.

But Louisiana has not decertified a single officer for misconduct in the past decade, records show. State officials said that local departments have failed to request decertifications. Local police officials said, however, that the process of decertifying an officer they no longer employ can be laborious and may not be worth the time.

Serpas said steps should be taken to make sure that officers are stripped of their state law enforcement certifications and that a national database of these officers should be created to help prevent them from returning to law enforcement.

“If you get terminated for untruthfulness or bribery or brutality, you really should not be allowed to be a police officer anywhere in the country,” Serpas said.

Sleeping, buying sex on duty
Police officer Carey Dykes arrived near the French Quarter just before dawn as fists were flying and fires were burning in the street. Soon, bottles were flung in his direction.

It was Feb. 16, 1999, and Dykes was quickly joined by a dozen other officers as the Mardi Gras party descended into chaos.

By the time it was over, police had jailed nearly 60 people. In the aftermath, Dykes, other officers and the city faced two federal lawsuits from people who alleged that they had been falsely arrested and were beaten by police. In the suits, witnesses said they saw Dykes and another officer “brutally beat” a man with nightsticks.

The city settled the two cases for a combined $60,850. In 2001, Dykes and the city were sued again: A pregnant woman said she was assaulted by Dykes as he tried to arrest her and her then-husband outside a French Quarter strip club.

“That cop, Dykes, came up to me before I could get all the way up off the ground and slammed me back down on the ground with my face in the ground and kept saying, ‘Keep still. Don’t move. Don’t move,’ ” the woman, Chantal Jarrell, now 45, said in an interview.

The city and the officers generally denied the allegations, but settled her suit for $400.

Records show that during the next decade, Dykes was suspended three times for violating department policies, including failing to follow instructions and filing incomplete reports.

Then, in July 2010, a woman told police officials that an officer was paying women for sex. She told internal affairs investigators that the officer — whom she identified as Dykes from a photo lineup — spent some of his nightly shifts cruising the streets “picking up working girls.” She complained that she had sex with him but was never paid.

The woman, who was not identified in the investigative reports, said Dykes picked her up in his squad car on July 4 and took her to the London Lodge, a nearby motel.

She said that she took a shower and emerged to see Dykes naked. The two then had vaginal and oral sex without a condom, she said.

Motel records showed that Dykes rented a $45 room, checking in with his driver’s license at 2:50 a.m. — in the middle of his patrol shift.

Investigators set up a sting.

Over several days, police recorded the woman speaking with Dykes on the phone while he was on duty. In one recording, the woman said she had a bacterial infection when they allegedly had unprotected sex and told him that he might pass it on to his wife.

Dykes said he was not worried about a bacterial infection. “Only STD will affect me,” he told her.

On the sting’s fifth night, investigators watched Dykes park his squad car at the London Lodge at 3:35 a.m. Almost an hour later, a 911 call came in from nearby: Two men had wrecked a Chevy Tahoe and fled on foot armed with assault rifles.

A dispatcher radioed Dykes to respond to the call but got no answer from him.

Ten minutes after the initial 911 call, the neighborhood erupted in gunfire, prompting five additional calls to 911.

Dykes’s white marked patrol car did not move, records show. Concerned, one of the officers watching Dykes approached his police cruiser: Dykes was inside asleep. The surveillance officer snapped a photo.

At 5:15 a.m. Dykes drove off and later wrote in his activity report that he had responded to the shooting.

The internal affairs investigation found that Dykes had violated department rules 17 times, including not devoting his entire shift to his police duty, transporting a civilian in his work vehicle, dishonesty and failing to respond to a dispatcher.

Dykes initially denied many of the allegations and said he did not have intercourse with the woman. When confronted with the findings of the surveillance, he admitted to having oral sex with the woman at the motel and failing to respond to the shooting.

Three months later, in February 2011, Dykes was fired. He appealed, but an arbitrator upheld his dismissal.

When reached by phone, Dykes, 44, said of his firing: “It happened over seven years ago. I’m not worried about it.” He declined to answer questions or comment further.

Months after he was fired, Dykes applied for a police job at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, records show.