Concerns Grow Over Who Indiana Towns May Be Hiring As Town Marshals
NEW CASTLE, Ind. — In May, two men showed up at a town council meeting in East Germantown, a small town in western Wayne County. They had a goal of leaving the meeting having been sworn in as town marshals, hoping to start their own police department.
It was unusual from the beginning, said the town’s attorney Joe Lipps.
“Two individuals (came) in here armed with firearms, one of them wearing a shirt that said ‘Police,’ and driving vehicles that showed me and other members of the town they included computers and law-enforcement-looking apparatuses,” Lipps said to WISH-TV.
The pitch was that they would patrol the town and provide law enforcement for $1 a year. One of the men even said that Lipps’ father, a former cop, was his training officer, which caught Lipps off-guard.
Lipps later figured out that that was not true.
“We asked the questions, the council did its due diligence interviewing them and questioning them for as much time as allotted during the meeting. Then (during) the follow-up over the phone, they didn’t have any answers, which made it a real easy decision to decline their offer,” Lipps said.
A couple of months later in Henry County, police pulled two men over in what appeared to be an unmarked cop car. They pulled them over because the car had no license plate. Henry County Sheriff John Sproles happened upon the traffic stop while he was off duty and offered assistance.
They got to talking to the men and it turns out it was the same pair who had tried to “infiltrate” East Germantown, as Sproles put it. The men were arrested for impersonating cops when they figured out they lied about where they were coming from. Also, one of the men was on their watch list already.
“One of those guys happened to be a guy we were watching who was a known gang member of a gang trying to infiltrate small-town police departments,” Sproles said. “There is a nationally recognized violent gang who has the goal to infiltrate small town police departments.”
