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Peace officer fired after missing wallet probe
22-03-2011
Tagged Under : Missing Wallet, Peace Officer, Wallet
Marvin Townsend, 23, a sergeant with the Human Resources Administration, was fired Wednesday, after an investigation into a client’s missing wallet, officials said.
A peace officer who worked at a social service center in East Harlem was canned after an 8-month investigation into the theft of a client’s wallet, officials said.
Marvin Townsend, 23, a sergeant with the Human Resources Administration, was fired Wednesday, an agency spokeswoman said.
Authorities said Jessica Scott complained to HRA officials that she was robbed when she went to an East Harlem office to enroll her nephew in a food stamp program. Scott became loud and disruptive, police said, and then Townsend removed Scott’s leather jacket while handcuffing her.
Inside a pocket were Scott’s wallet and a hand-held PlayStation game. Scott said she never got her wallet back, and the game was broken when it was returned days later.
Instead of vouchering Scott’s belongings, Townsend kept them locked in his office, according to an HRA memo obtained by the Daily News. Only Townsend and another peace officer, Christopher Singleton, had access to the office.
Singleton, 46, later admitted to HRA police brass that he “took the hand-held game home to ‘play with it’….[but] denied that he removed the wallet,” the memo stated.
Singleton told investigators he suspected Townsend stole the wallet. He said Townsend pressured him to lie on an incident report and then offered Scott money to cover the whole thing up, according to the memo.
Scott confirmed Townsend offered her an unspecified amount of money if she would sign a document saying she had been compensated. She said she never signed, or was paid.
The HRA spokesman said there was not enough proof of misconduct against Singleton to “initiate a discipline action against him.”
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