WHIDBEY ISLAND, Wash. — A Whidbey Island police chief who made headlines for losing his gun has been forced to resign.
Oak Harbor Police Chief Ed Green gained public attention when he left his gun inside the bathroom of a local grocery store back in March.
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Mayor Bob Severns issued him a written reprimand for that but since the mayor took office in January he has been conducting his own investigation into the department and the chief as a whole.
Oak Harbor City Council Member Jim Campbell says there’s not a lot of turnover in a small town -- and that’s a good thing.
“You take your wives out to dinner together, you go shopping together, kids play together and all that kind of stuff,” Campbell explained.
That hasn’t been the case with the city’s police chiefs; four years ago a new mayor forced the police chief then to resign, and now Mayor Severns is doing the same with now former Chief Green -- a veteran cop with 30 years of experience, including time in the LAPD’s gang unit.
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Campbell says he knew Severns was conducting interviews with dozens of current and former police department employees -- but he didn’t expect this.
“I am of a notion in my management style that if there is a problem then you fix it and letting people go is not necessarily what you do,” Campbell told us.
But Severns told the Whidbey Island newspaper that the department was broken. He cited a lack of communication between the chief and the chief's captain; he didn't mention the incident with the gun.
“That might have been part of it, might have been another checkmark Bob used to evaluate the whole situation,” Campbell said.
We wanted to know for certain so we called the mayor and stopped by his office, but we were told he was gone for the day. We went to Ed Green’s house as well, but he said he wasn’t ready to comment.
The Oak Harbor City Council is meeting Tuesday night to vote on Green’s severance package and also to hear more specifics from the mayor as to why he came to this decision.
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Cox Media Group
