Drew Forsythe must go.
The chief of the Greece Police Department.
He’s got to go. Resign, retire, be fired. Whatever. He’s just got to go.
And he’s got to go now.
Thursday morning early, about 1:30, he’s barreling up 390 in his town-issued police SUV, having started the evening at a law enforcement fundraiser. The story is he swerved to avoid a deer and slammed into a guardrail, peeling it back and taking the right front wheel off the chiefmobile.
That’s the first part that’s hard to believe.
Nobody who passed driver’s ed swerves to avoid a deer. Everybody knows it’s dangerous. Everybody knows it’s the wrong thing to do. Especially somebody who’s spent some 30 years investigating accidents and taking emergency-vehicle driving courses.
And yet, according to Forsythe’s subordinates, that’s what he did.
We’re also supposed to believe that there, alongside of the Interstate, he tried to make a report of the wreck on his police radio, but it didn’t work.
Must be his cell phone didn’t work either.
And must be he didn’t want to wait there.
Because he drove off. On three wheels. A little bit after closing time. On the Interstate. A shower of sparks as the right front axle gouged the pavement.
For five miles.
Drew Forsythe, the chief of the Greece Police Department. Leaving the scene of an accident acting for all the world like somebody trying to beat a DWI.
Finally, five miles later – having chosen not to head toward department headquarters, just two miles from the mangled guardrail – he pulled over, magically got his police radio to work, and called that he had a problem.
A vehicle problem. Not a drinking problem. We don’t know if he’s called anybody about that.
But we think he ought to.
Because this story does not pass a field sobriety test. And we’ll never know if Drew Forsythe would have passed a field sobriety test, because he wasn’t administered one.
When one of his subordinate patrol officers responded to the scene, and the paperwork got done and the truck got towed, nobody in their law enforcement mind thought that maybe this smelled a bit like ETOH. No field sobriety test, no breathalyzer, no blood draw. Not even just in case. Not even to demonstrate his sobriety in the face of what looks to every honest person like a punk-ass, slovenly, drunk-bastard DWI.
They just let him go home.
Proving, like Paul said in the Bible, that the hog will go back to its mire and the dog will go back to its vomit, and the Greece Police Department brass just can’t keep its head out of its ass. In a department clouded for decades by old-boys corruption, where political and family pull has run the place year after year, this was just exactly the wrong thing to have happen. We’ve already been down the road of some Greece cop in the dark of the night having a mystery wreck. I think, though, in the SOP you’re supposed to call Merritt Rahn for a ride home, not three-wheel it across the town.
Further, in a region roiled by anti-cop sentiment, this stabs the Thin Blue Line in the back and makes people wonder if maybe the people with their fist in the air might be right. It’s pretty dispiriting for those who defend the police to have a guy the Republicans wanted to be sheriff turn around and do something like this. This just smells dirty. It degrades respect for the police. It demonstrates an immoral double standard. It is contemptible. It disgraces the uniform and the badge.
Drunk or not, you don’t drive away from a wreck. Especially not on three frigging wheels for five miles. And anybody who does, gets a ride in the back of a cop car.
Unless you’re the chief of the Greece Police Department.
This looks for all the world like the cops covering for one of their own – the worst form of corruption.
It also, a week before the election, turns Greece town politics on end.
That’s because it raises questions about the ethics of Greece town Supervisor Bill Reilich. The former county Republican chairman, he is up for re-election. It’s an election he should have easily in hand. While very heavy handed politically, with everything being about who you know and who you’re related to, he has also been a competent and tireless supervisor. He has done a good job.
But Forsythe is his boy, muscled into the Greece Police Department by his order to help a Republican out.
And while the community didn’t find out about the chief’s tricycle adventure until Saturday, Bill Reilich woke up to the news Thursday morning.
And said nothing.
Think about that.
All day Thursday. All day Friday. Most of the day Saturday.
Reilich sat on it. He hid it. He didn’t order a press release. He didn’t order an investigation. He kept his mouth shut.
He covered his buddy’s ass.
That’s a situation which continues to the present.
And that gets to his competence as a supervisor. Not his ability to supervise the workforce and policy of the town, but his ability to do so in a fashion free of the taint of corruption and improper influence too many fear are Greece hallmarks. The three-day coverup of this wreck is exactly the sort of thing that has defined Greece politics for more than a generation. It reeks of thuggery.
And it can’t be tolerated. It must be set right.
Greece should fire its police chief today.
Or it should fire its supervisor next week.
And maybe it will choose to do both.