Merced, California, Aug. 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — “This wouldn’t be our fight, this shouldn’t be our fight,” said Sister Kate of the battle for control of the police department in the small town of Livingston, “except for the fact that the Sheriff’s department decided to make it about cannabis. Since they made it about cannabis, it is now our fight.”
In a little town in Merced County, in the Central Valley of California, on Tuesday night this week, the Sisters and the local activists succeeded in blocking the sheriff from occupying the town law-enforcement leadership.
Several months ago, a vacancy opened for police chief in the town of Livingston nearby the farm of the Sisters of the Valley. The town has twice the number of cops per resident as the City of Merced. The Sheriff and his department govern the county, and even though Livingston is outside his jurisdiction, the Sheriff stepped in and declared he would ‘save Livingston’ by assigning the infamous Chuck Hale to the job. And then, he wouldn’t leave when they asked him to.
A few months into Chuck Hale being interim police chief, the people began to wake to the realization that they had been assigned a police chief likely to have been rejected everywhere else because of his well-documented history of dishonesty. Look up the Ethan Morse trial, the Merced County case that settled in 2018 with Chuck Hale costing the taxpayers a half million dollars in a settlement for his sins.
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