Saturday, May 23, 2009 | Opinion
SP HOW MAYOR FRANKLIN GETS REVENGE: COP SUSPENDED

Atlanta Police Department Sgt. Scott Kreher won’t be on the streets fighting the bad guys today because he stood up for a bunch of crippled cops that everyone could have just forgotten about—as Mayor Shirley Franklin has willfully forgotten about them—if  Kreher had just kept his mouth shut.

 

Atlanta Police Department Sgt. Scott Kreher won’t be on the streets fighting the bad guys today because he stood up for a bunch of crippled cops that everyone could have just forgotten about—as Mayor Shirley Franklin has willfully forgotten about them—if  Kreher had just kept his mouth shut.

 

But, he wouldn’t. So as of today, Sgt. Kreher has been suspended with pay indefinitely for “conduct unbecoming a police officer.”

 

That conduct was simply this: In a City Council meeting on May 20, he informed the council of the harassment and medical neglect that has been foisted upon Detective J.J. Biello, Detective Bob Buffington, Detective Richard Williams, Sgt. Ryan Phinney, and Officer Patricia Cocciolone by Mayor Shirley Franklin’s administration.

 

I wrote a story about those cops. We published it on May 17. It’s called “Badges, Bullets and Broken Promises,” and in it you can read for yourself how a cop paralyzed from the chest down, thanks to a drug dealer’s bullet, has to beg City Hall to please pay for his support stockings.

 

You can read about how a cop who saved the lives of every patron at a Buckhead restaurant was forced by Franklin’s administration to wait for five months for his wheelchair to be repaired. When did the city decide to pay for it to be fixed? The day its state of disrepair resulted in his leg being broken.

 

You can read how a cop paralyzed in a traffic accident while on duty was forced by the city to endure excruciating pain caused by kidney stones for four days while Mayor Franklin’s risk management officer wondered whether the officer’s pain justified a CT scan. He wound up in an emergency room.

 

You can read how a detective in the police department’s school resource program, who still works even though he’s been in a wheelchair for the past 22 years after being shot by a criminal, was finessed by the city into getting a jerry-rigged van without proper seals or ventilation and, as a result, developed pneumonia.

 

You can read about how a female police officer had her brains blown out by the lunatic who killed her partner, but somehow survived—only to have the City of Atlanta, under the leadership of Mayor Shirley Franklin, deny payment for the medication that she needed to stave off debilitating migraines caused by the injury.

 

(And now that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has finally published a story about them, as of today, you can read about them there, too, in a very fine story by the great Bill Torpy.)

 

The indignities that these cops, all of them injured in the line of duty, have suffered at the hands of Mayor Franklin’s administration are simply unconscionable.

 

And that is what Kreher told the City Council: “These five officers were injured in the line of duty…I want to beat her [Mayor Franklin] in the head with a baseball bat sometimes when I think about it...I cannot believe Mayor Franklin’s administration would allow this to happen. This administration should be ashamed of itself.”

 

Mayor Franklin was not present. Kreher was not visibly incensed. He did not say that he would beat her in the head with a baseball bat. Nor did he have a baseball bat with him.

 

Kreher said that he sometimes wanted to beat the mayor in the head with a baseball bat in precisely the same way that President Jimmy Carter said that he had lusted in his heart after women other than his wife Rosalyn. Did anyone think for a minute that by admitting his feelings Carter was letting us know that he was going to have an affair? Of course not. I’ve been very critical of President Carter about many things, but I have never said he is an adulterer because admitting publicly to having a desire to do something is a very different thing from intending to carry it out.

 

Yet, Franklin has said “I think it’s [Kreher’s remark] intended to intimidate me, my family and city officials. I think it’s very dangerous language and when someone says they want to take a bat and hit you in the head, from my experience, they want to kill you.”

 

Her family is intimidated? Franklin’s daughter is, even this minute, on probation for money laundering for her now-ex-husband, a kingpin in one of the most violent drug rings in the history of Atlanta. Mayor Franklin must have had at least a few dinners with the thug, yet she expects us to believe that she is afraid of a cop who says that her treatment of paralyzed and brain-damaged police officers makes him want to take a baseball bat to her head when he thinks about it sometimes?

 

Mayor Shirley Franklin’s use of her office to carry out her personal vendetta against the police should scare us all. She is dangerous. She has withheld medicine and wheelchair repair from disabled cops. And now she has used her office to lash out at the one man who had the courage to call her on it.

 

If she can retaliate, unimpeded, against those who publically expose her failures, where will it end? How much personal revenge do you think she can cram into the next seven months?