Hazard’s police chief, entangled in two lawsuits, is fired by city commissioners
City commissioners in Hazard fired the city’s police chief Monday night on the heels of two recent lawsuits filed against him.
One accused him of improperly arresting a man seeking records and another alleged he retaliated against an officer who reported an incident of excessive force.
Chief Darren Williams’ employment was terminated effective immediately, City Manager Tony Eversole confirmed Tuesday to the Herald-Leader.
“They just wanted the department to go in a different direction,” Eversole said of the commission members.
Eversole, whose background is in law enforcement, said there is a command structure in place at the department to keep it running without problems, and that he will help supervise it.
“Things I think will remain smooth,” he said.
Hazard Mayor Donald “Happy” Mobelini said Williams had been chief about 18 months. He said city officials hope to hire a replacement quickly.
Late last month, a former deputy police chief, Jessica Cornett, filed a federal lawsuit alleging she was demoted, retaliated against and eventually fired after asking Williams to make a report on an incident in which she said he placed someone in a neck restraint or choked them without justification.
When Williams declined to complete a use-of-force report on the incident, Cornett sent a memo to Eversole and ultimately filed a complaint in Perry Circuit Court. Williams pinned the complaint to the wall at police headquarters the next day, according to public records.
Cornett said in the lawsuit that other officers were encouraged to make complaints against her. She says she was moved to the night shift, had her patrol car taken from her home and was given six “baseless” reprimands over a three-month period, the Herald-Leader reported.
She was fired in August. The lawsuit seeks expenses, punitive damages and the restoration of her rank and seniority rights at Hazard’s police department.
And in September, a Perry County man, Dallas Campbell, filed a lawsuit against Williams and the city of Hazard, alleging he was wrongfully arrested and assaulted by Williams when he went to the police department July 29 to submit a Kentucky Open Records Request.
Campbell says in the lawsuit he was asking for names of police officers, their hire dates and salaries, all of which are to be publicly available under Kentucky law.
Williams and the clerk in the police station’s lobby refused to provide the records and told Campbell, who was recording his interaction with them, that recording them was illegal, the suit claims.
Williams told Campbell to leave. After an interaction in which Campbell asserted his right to the information, Williams ultimately arrested him, charging him with menacing and disorderly conduct.
While Campbell was waiting to be taken to jail after his arrest, the lawsuit says the clerk took his phone and deleted video from it without his permission, as Williams stood nearby.
“Since Campbell had been arrested and would be imminently charged with a crime, the deletion of the video on Campbell’s phone constituted tampering with evidence of a crime,” the lawsuit states.
The footage was later recovered, and the county attorney dropped the criminal charges against Campbell after viewing it, according to the suit.
Campbell and his attorneys still had not received responses from the city to their records requests for the information Campbell was seeking, as required by Kentucky law, the Herald-Leader reported last month.
In its answer to the complaint, the city says Campbell’s complaint should be dismissed “on the grounds that it fails to state a claim against the Defendants for which the Court can properly grant relief.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2024 at 12:57 PM.
