One might think that Augusta/Richmond County Sheriff Richard Roundtree has more feet than a centipede with the number of shoes he has dropped lately.
The tally is now six officers arrested for excessive force at the Charles Webster Detention Facility over an incident that took place two years ago.
Now, the first question should be, if the sheriff’s office has had video recording of the melee, why has it taken that amount of time for the evidence to make it into the hands of the district attorney?
From there, the questions really start flowing.
Have the officers involved in this incident been allowed to stay on the job for the last two years, or have they been lounging around their home, collecting a city paycheck while on administrative leave while the sheriff’s office looks at a videotape?
To be fair, I have not seen an unedited copy of the video in question; however, police brutality should never be allowed or swept under the rug.
Also, to be fair, I have toured the Webster Detention Facility and can attest that the conditions there are deplorable, and most of the squalid conditions are caused by the inmates.
The inmates sit around all day smoking their synthetic weed, get bored and cause mischief such as clogging the toilets with whole rolls of toilet paper. When the toilets are not fixed immediately, they smoke a little more pot and attack the fire suppression system, flooding the pod.
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The windows of the various jail pods have thick plastic tinting and walking through the corridor is eerie; however, the plastic sheeting is necessary because the inmates have their own form of sign language and would communicate using hand signals from pod to pod, causing even more mischief.
I would rather walk unarmed down East Boundary at midnight, wearing a Rolex and Air Jordans with two pockets full of cash, than work one shift at the county jail. That is how bad it is.
As citizens, we must ask ourselves whether would we want to find out that our otherwise law-abiding child made a mistake and ended up in a jail housed in the same jail pod with vicious criminals whose greatest skills are creating shanks out of destroyed light fixtures? Would we want to learn that our kid had been handcuffed and forced to lie on a flooded floor?
After touring the Columbia County Jail, as a parent, if my kid had an error of judgment that landed them in that lockup, I would know that my kid was safe and secure while I try to figure out how to help them.
Thankfully, I have a law-abiding young-un, but who knows? Innocent people get arrested everyday.
Let’s say that a computer glitch has occurred, and you are pulled over for a suspended license. Now, you know you are innocent, but you are going to jail anyway.
Would you want to spend the night in the Richmond County lock-up?
There is a reason that, while I am a co-founder of The Augusta Press, I am not the managing editor for the newspaper. I do not have management skills; I am a good researcher and a decent writer, but I would not know the first thing about running a daily newspaper.
The same goes for Roundtree. “Tree,” as he was known on the streets, was a tough, no nonsense cop; but he was also compassionate. People who normally were terrified of the police would talk to Tree and in many ways, he proved himself an excellent beat cop.
However, Roundtree is not an administrator, and sadly, he has proven that time and again.
His first mistake was asking the commission for a raise, shortly after being elected, before asking for raises for his deputies, which caused a morale problem. He then chased away some of his best employees because he felt they were not loyal enough to him.
When it was discovered that several officers tested positive for steroids, Roundtree claimed he was powerless to do anything about it.
After being whittled down to a skeleton staff with a falling down jail packed with inmates, Roundtree did not take immediate action, but rather sent his lieutenants to the commission to ask for piecemeal funding here and there, and instructed road patrol to ignore private burglar alarms.
We are now at a point where we cannot wait for the next election cycle to right this mess.
It is only a matter of time before the state gets involved and that is exactly what needs to happen. Otherwise, a tragedy is going to happen, and the taxpayers are going to get struck with paying out huge court settlements.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
