Upset, chiefly, in Bratenahl

Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
BYLINE: The Plain Dealer

Bratenahl, OH

In a damning report released Monday, just-retired Bratenahl Police Chief Paul Falzone gets hit with a double trifecta: incompetent, inefficient and insubordinate, as well as dissentious, disingenuous and dishonest.

Falzone, who stepped aside two weeks ago, is still the target of an inquiry by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, and villagers have every right to expect that he be held fully accountable for the disaster that the Bratenahl Police Department evidence room became during his 14 years as chief.

A Plain Dealer investigation last year triggered Falzone's downfall by reporting that guns, cash, drugs and an evidence log book had all gone missing.

Monday's report came from former Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Richard Lille, who just completed a four-month investigation commissioned by the village.

The 13 allegations Lille has leveled against Falzone include telling witnesses to lie to protect him; failing to cooperate with the BCI; running a campaign for county sheriff out of his Bratenahl office; constantly contacting the department after being placed on leave and - after being ordered to stop by the mayor - demanding that the acting chief ask the police union to support him.

Mayor John Licastro was on the hot seat Monday, too, and deservedly so. If he had any inkling of what Falzone was up to, that's a huge problem. If the mayor didn't know, that's only a slightly smaller problem - one reminiscent of County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones' response to news that a former county recorder wasted $1 million a year: "We all had a sense something was wrong."

Left unsaid, of course, was that "we all" did nothing about it.

Monday night, Licastro tried to brush off his irate constituents, telling them to put their questions in writing and wait. Bad idea. The people of Bratenahl deserve complete and timely answers in a public forum. The longer village officials make them wait, the more citizens' righteous anger will grow.

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International Association for Property and Evidence
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