Hats off to Fred Fletcher: No fear of police probes here

photo Chattanooga police Chief Fred Fletcher said he has given the TBI "unfettered access" to anything they need to investigate allegations against Officer Karl Fields.

Chattanooga's new police chief, Fred Fletcher, acted very professionally and very wisely in asking Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston to seek a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation probe into allegations that a major crimes detective sexually harassed a woman whose reported rape he was assigned to investigate.

The woman says Officer Karl Fields sexually harassed her, and last week her attorney gave Pinkston copies of text messages allegedly between Fields and the rape victim from June through August, when Fields was the lead investigator in the woman's case.

In one series of text messages given to the Times Free Press, he tells her he just finished masturbating and asks if she would like to join him. The woman did not respond. She says she never had sex with Fields, despite his persistent advances.

Fields is no stranger to trouble. The police department's internal affairs division has examined his conduct five times since 2004. The department suspended the officer without pay for 14 days in 2006 after he crashed his Jeep Cherokee while driving drunk. After the crash, Fields called police and said two men had stolen his car, according to the internal affairs report. When officers arrived, they realized Fields was drunk. They also found his vehicle, damaged from the crash. A man who rode with Fields that night said the officer fired his pistol multiple times while behind the wheel, although police never found a gun after the crash.

This is the first time an outside agency has conducted a criminal investigation into his work.

Fletcher on Friday told the Times Editorial Page that he asked Pinkston to seek the TBI probe, and he and the DA were in "100 percent agreement" that an outside look was needed.

An outside eye will avoid the appearance of any investigative impropriety, avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest and make sure the most thorough, timely and complete investigation is conducted, he said.

Fletcher also said he has given the TBI "unfettered access" to anything they need to investigate the allegations. He said he told TBI investigators to "please keep an open eye" and let him know if anything else they see raises concern.

"This is a rare opportunity for an outside agency to have a peak at my organization, and I welcome that transparency and that accountability," Fletcher said. "You can expect this to be the standard."

What a wonderful breath of fresh air for Chattanooga. And perhaps for the region as well.

The new chief said he is making "a ground-up assessment" of the department "to decide what it should look like in the next generation."

"I know one thing that is needed in every organization is some sort of quality control or quality assurance. And it's needed nowhere more than in serious crimes investigation, so one of the things on my priority list is to contemplate creating both a cold case unit and a quality control function," Fletcher said.

He said both the DA and the sheriff want to partner to create a regionwide cold-case unit, and that unit could also provide a key quality control function to ensure officers are doing complete investigations and treating people fairly.

What a fantastic idea. And one too long coming.

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