Thread: Former Carson Sheriff's station commander, Capt. Bernice Abram, caught in sting

Former Carson Sheriff's station commander, Capt. Bernice Abram, caught in sting

By City News Service
Posted: 11/23/2012 11:21:10 AM PST
Updated: 11/23/2012 11:31:14 AM PST

Carson Sheriff's Department captain Bernice Abram was relieved of her command. (Daily Breeze file photo)

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials created an elaborate sting operation to prove that a respected captain was secretly passing information to a suspected drug dealer, The Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
Capt. Bernice Abram, who headed the Carson Sheriff's station, was believed to be giving information to Dion Grim, the suspected drug dealer.

In April 2011, sheriff's officials placed Abram on leave and for more than a year afterward her ties to Grim were investigated.
(Lt. Eddie Rivero, who has served as the acting captain since Abram was relieved last April, officially took command on April 1.)

Prosecutors recently declined to file charges against Abram, saying they couldn't prove the captain knew that Grim, a documented gang member, was involved in illegal activities. But a district attorney's memo explaining that decision provides the most detailed description yet of how the sheriff's department came to believe that one of its up-and-coming leaders was betraying the agency and shows the efforts officials pursued to prove it, the newspaper reported.
The memo also documents several occasions when Abram appeared to use her authority to help Grim avoid law enforcement scrutiny. An FBI investigation into Abram is ongoing, a spokeswoman said.

The Sheriff's Department placed Abram on leave along with her niece, a custody assistant whom prosecutors said improperly accessed a law enforcement database

for Grim. They remain on leave and together have collected more than an estimated $300,000 in salary as the sheriff's internal probe continues, based on posted county salaries, the Times reported.Abram first met Grim after she started dating his father three years ago, prosecutors said. She became "good friends" with Grim, 36, a member of the Original Front Hood Crips, a Compton street gang.

In 2010, FBI agents had begun investigating Grim, suspecting that he was the ringleader of a cross-county drug trafficking ring. A sheriff's detective helping with the investigation was reviewing Grim's wiretapped phone calls when he heard a woman's voice he recognized: Abram's.

In the months that followed, authorities continued to target Grim.

On several occasions, Abram interjected herself, prosecutors said. In one instance, a sheriff's deputy, Michael Haggerty, was directed by the FBI to arrest Grim after a traffic stop, the newspaper reported.

The district attorney's memo details Abram's involvement in the case:

Shortly after the arrest, she called the Compton station and asked for Grim to be quickly released from custody. She got his car out of impound and got the fees waived. She also picked Grim up from jail, according to the memo.

Days later, she texted another deputy at the Compton station who considered her a mentor, asking if he knew Haggerty. She told him Haggerty had issued a ticket to a family member of hers and that the court date was approaching. "Feel him out," she reportedly said.

The deputy then approached Haggerty and told him that a friend from the Carson station "who had a lot of clout asked him not to show up in court if he was issued a subpoena," according to the memo. The city attorney dismissed the case, however, so Haggerty was never subpoenaed, the newspaper reported.

Around that time, sheriff's officials began receiving multiple citizen complaints against Haggerty. One of the complainants, the memo states, "admitted that Abram instructed them to make complaints to get Haggerty transferred" out of Compton.
The favors continued, according to prosecutors. In January last year, Grim called Abram to ask about police activity on his street. She called back minutes later and told him that sheriff's gang enforcement deputies had served search warrants targeting two shooting suspects and planned to serve another the next day.

A few months later, Grim was ticketed again, and he immediately called Abram. She ordered a detective at her station to "look into it," according to the memo, an order he understood to mean that he should get the ticket dismissed.
That month, sheriff's investigators moved in with their sting operation, ensnaring Abram with the phony surveillance plans. She was relieved of duty, along with her niece, Chantell White, a custody assistant at the sheriff's South L.A. station. Investigators discovered that on three occasions, Grim used White to access a law enforcement database to run a friend's name for outstanding warrants, according to the D.A.'s memo.
Former Carson Sheriff's station commander, Capt. Bernice Abram, caught in sting - The Daily Breeze

Interesting take.
Major Hasan Syndrome’ at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department?

Once again, incompetence and even criminal behavior get ignored for the sake of diversity.

by
JACK DUNPHY
November 28, 2012

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people (and, lest we forget, an unborn child) and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, had raised a number of red flags suggesting a disposition for committing, or at the very least having sympathy for, acts of Islamic terror prior to his massacre. The signs were ignored due to political correctness.

There is a price to be paid for the “inclusiveness” and “diversity” we’re all supposed to be so proud of. We can be thankful the price is seldom as dreadful as it was at Fort Hood, but sometimes the cost is a level of criminality less horrific but disturbing all the same.

Witness the case of Bernice Abram, a captain with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The Los Angeles Times has reportedthat since April of last year, Capt. Abram has been on paid administrative leave after being caught in a sting that revealed her relationship with Dion Grim, a suspected drug dealer.

According to the Times, a Sheriff’s Department detective was listening to wiretapped phone calls Grim had made when he recognized Capt. Abram’s voice on the line. In the ensuing sting, Capt. Abram was advised of a purported drug investigation being conducted near Grim’s home. Minutes later, as investigators listened in, Abram phoned Grim and warned him about the operation. She was immediately placed on paid leave, as was her niece, a civilian jail employee, who is accused of illegally accessing law enforcement databases on behalf of Grim.

Together, Abram and her niece have collected about $300,000 in salary since being put on leave, says the Times.

The Times took care to note that Abram was a “respected captain with more than 150 deputies under her command.” To that characterization a question must be raised: respected by whom? Concerns about Abram’s relationship with Grim had arisen long before she was ensnared in the sting. Indeed, she had made no secret of her willingness to help Grim get through previous brushes with the law, going so far as to order him released from custody after he was arrested on a drug charge, and securing the release of his car from the impound lot without his having to pay the customary fees. Abram even picked Grim up from jail herself. She also used her position to fix traffic tickets issued to Grim and his sister.

It is inconceivable that Abram’s conduct wasn’t widely known among the rank and file deputies, both at her own station and at the one near where Grim lived. It is also inconceivable that word of her questionable ties to Grim did not reach people above her in the chain of command, people who in theory should have been able to correct her behavior.

So why did it take such a flagrant act of subverting her own department’s objectives before action was taken against her? Everyone knows the answer to that: Abram was given a pass because she is a black female working in an organization that values “diversity” more than competence, and even, to at least some extent, more than adherence to the law.

Just as Major Hasan’s superiors in the Army turned a blind eye to his descent into jihadism lest they be branded as intolerant, Capt. Abram’s superiors in the Sheriff’s Department were content to ignore her relationship with a criminal for fear of stirring the wrath of this or that group of racial grievance-mongers. That she so boldly interfered with the prosecution of criminal cases against her friend the drug dealer, even to the point of asking others in the Sheriff’s Department to act on her behalf, is an indication of the freedom she felt in flouting the law and the Sheriff’s Department’s regulations. She knew no one would dare touch her.

Lest my friends in the Sheriff’s Department accuse me of picking on them, my own Los Angeles Police Department is not immune to Major Hasan Syndrome.
PJ Media