City worker's arrest exposes gap in security checks

The arrest of a worker Monday on charges of theft has exposed a shortcoming in the city’s pre-employment background checks.
The city employee is accused of taking a pit bull puppy from a front-porch kennel on North 3rd Street while the owner was at work.
A witness alerted the owner who called police.
Witnesses in the initial investigation said the man took the puppy.
He said he picked it up in the street and took it home.
After the arrest, some of the witnesses recanted and said that is what happened.
Mayor Rusty Moody initially suspended the man, hired in May of this year, without pay pending resolution of the matter.
But the employee’s circumstances became more precarious when Moody learned late Tuesday that a Eunice News check of court records show the worker has a felony record, which precludes in ordinary circumstances his working for the city.
According to 27th District Court records, the man in 2011 was sentenced to five years hard labor for simple theft, suspended for three years’s active probation, and to six months in jail, suspended for 1 year’s probation, concurrent with the other charge.
The felonies did not appear in the Police Department background check because the arrests were not made by city police officers.
As noted on the form used by the department, its responses are based on a review of the city police database only.
Neither City Court, City Marshal, St. Landry Sheriff, State Police or the FBI data bases are included, nor are likely data bases of Homeland Security and Interpol.
City police by law cannot access state and federal criminal data bases for such checks and the police-City Court data banks do not interface.
Since the arrest wasn’t an EPD collar, it didn’t show on the background check when it was returned to Moody.
Moody noted the obvious when he said “we have to do something about how checks are conducted.”