Houston fires police captain

HOUSTON — Houston City Council voted 4 to 2 Tuesday to fire Houston Police Capt. Charley McAnally, leaving the local police department unmanned by the end of next week unless a new officer can be hired.

“They’ve successfully closed the police department down against the will of the public,” McAnally said Wednesday after Mayor Virgie Thompson, Deputy Mayor Jim Johansen, Councilwoman Kathleen Barney and Councilman Paul Stout voted to terminate him. “Those buffoons fired me because they think I lied about the FBI investigation, but I am willing to take a lie detector test to prove I’m not lying about the investigation currently underway on Mayor Thompson and Treasurer Carolyn Grabowski.”

McAnally said he plans to file lawsuits against Thompson, Johansen and Grabowski for allegedly violating city policies and possibly breaking the law.

Council members Ruth Blanchard and Lance Wilson were the only ones voting in the captain’s favor Tuesday.

Johansen, Barney and Stout did not return phone messages this week.

Wilson said Wednesday he didn’t think the termination was legal.

“I think it violates city code and the city’s employment handbook,” Wilson said.

He said the handbook states that city employees are encouraged to report to the mayor and/or council any act that is unlawfully or improperly committed by an employee or council member and that the reporting employee shouldn’t suffer any repercussions or retaliations.

“There have been multiple acts of retaliation against Capt. McAnally since he began to investigate allegations of improper acts by the city administration,” Wilson said. “Multiple requests from Capt. McAnally to address this retaliation through the city’s grievance process have been ignored, including his request that an independent arbitrator be called in to help resolve the issue.”

Thompson said Wednesday she voted to fire McAnally because she felt it was what was best for the community. She said she could not discuss the details of the decision since they were made in executive session, but she said she chose not to recuse herself from the vote to fire the captain because she didn’t feel she had a conflict of interest.

“City code states I should recuse myself if I have financial or personal gain from any decision and I didn’t have either in this case,” Thompson said when asked why she chose to vote on the matter when she had declared a conflict of interest previously during council’ s discussion on McAnally’s performance evaluation.

She said the city will be seeking to hire a new police officer and, in the meantime, has contacted Alaska State Troopers to cover emergency calls.

“We’ve already done some proactive things such as contacting the DA’s office to make sure they work with the officer in charge to get ongoing cases taken care of so that all that hard work won’t be let go,” she said.

One Houston police officer already had taken a job in Fort Yukon and the other officer will be gone May 6. Thompson had asked McAnally recently to either lay off his two officers or cut everyone — including himself — to 20 hours per week to save the city money. He said he chose the latter because he didn’t want to put his men out on the street. They were starting families and one had just purchased a home, he said.

But because they were still on emergency call 24/7, they couldn’t get another part-time job to make up the drop in income. So they chose to leave, he said.

The department’s administrative support staff had been laid off already, so Capt. McAnally would have had to run the entire department by himself. Now that he’s been terminated for reasons he feels are unwarranted and possibly illegal, he said he’s fighting back.

The captain told the council after the vote that they had made a huge mistake.

“You guys have made a very unwise decision,” he said. “You will see for yourself that I was telling the truth about the FBI investigation. The agent I’ve been working with will be in court, too. He’s going to be there to help me win a lawsuit against you.”

McAnally claims he’s a witness for an FBI investigation into possible funds mismanagement by Grabowski and Thompson and that he’s supplied recordings and documents to the FBI. Some of those recordings were made secretly by McAnally during conversations he had with Thompson in January.

The FBI has neither confirmed nor denied the investigation. Subsequently, Grabowski recently filed a grievance with the city against McAnally for “defamation of character.”

Grabowski said McAnally should not be able to claim there’s an FBI investigation on someone if such an investigation can’t even be verified.

In one of McAnally’s recordings of Thompson he shared with the Frontiersman last month, he can be heard telling the mayor about the FBI investigation and her simply responding calmly with, “That’s fine.”

McAnally feels the recording proves Thompson knew about the investigation back in January — before she filled out her job performance evaluation on him in mid-March. Thompson claimed she had no knowledge of a possible investigation before she turned in the captain’s evaluation, which was full of negative remarks and scores.

Three months prior to that evaluation, McAnally had received glowing feedback from Thompson on his previous evaluation. All of McAnally’s evaluations before that from Houston mayors were, by and large, positive.

The controversy caused the council to throw out the March evaluation on the captain and order a new one by Johansen. McAnally said he didn’t feel the deputy mayor could give him a fair evaluation either since he had charged Johansen with fourth-degree assault after a verbal altercation with Planning Commissioner Ralph Buzard following recent council meeting.

McAnally said this week he doesn’t know what became of Johansen’s evaluation on him.

“They fired me without a new evaluation,” he said.

He said that although he realizes pursuing legal action against city officials could make it harder for him to find employment in the future, he feels it’s what he needs to do to not only vindicate himself, but stop the same thing from happening to other officers in the future.

“It is really a circus up there,” McAnally said. “They’ve ignored the city attorney and they’ve ignored common sense. I mean, how idiotic can they be to fire me for something I can easily prove I wasn’t lying about? This will be an extremely easy case for me to win because they’ve been so blatant with their harassment.”

McAnally said it could cost the city more than $100,000 to fight him in court.

“The citizens deserve better,” he said. “They don’t deserve to be managed by a cage full of monkeys. This needs to be addressed and fixed.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.