Fighting For My Right to Work

I have been a dedicated police officer for 19 years in the state of Virginia and South Carolina.  I had gotten hired by a large local sheriff's department in South Carolina in 2011 and had figured this is where I was going to finish out my career.  I had thought I hit the jackpout by being hired by this particular agency and it was an excellent place while I worked on patrol.  I had wonderful supervisors and worked on patrol for two years but I felt I wanted to broaden my horizons and applied to the traffic divsion.  I was accepted onto the traffic division and immendiately became the target of bullying by the traffic sergeant.  I endured the constant harassment for approximately a year because what else can you do?  You don't go to internal affairs because they are not on your side.  Fast forward to June 2014, I was working a public safety checkpoint in which a vehicle attempted to drive into a group of officers, myself included.  When I stepped back, I dropped my ticket book and it was run over.  My sergeant approached me and grabbed me by my throat and proceeded to yell in my face in front of the remaining officers about the ticket book.  As much as I wanted to punch him, I refrained as I am considerably bigger than him and I felt he was baiting me.  I did not want to be fired for fighting.  I let the incident go.  A couple months later, I was pulled into Internal Affairs for a post I made on the closed Facebook site LEO Only which is a site in which police officers can vent and network with one another.  Apparently someone from the department had been trolling the site reporting people that made posts they did not approve of.  Due to this infraction I was removed from the traffic division, placed on probation and returned to patrol.  Going back to patrol was perfectly fine by me - I was away from this particular sergeant and my stress level dropped.  Through word of mouth from some very reliable people, I was told that this sergeant was hell bent on ruining my entire career.  Knowing that he had more contacts than myself at the department, I broke down and expressed my concerns to Internal Affairs.  Instead of looking into the assault that was committed by one of their sergeants and the continued harassment I faced, I was questioned about the ticket book that was run over by the vehicle at the checkpoint 4 months prior.  I was forced to take a polygraph about the ticket book because I was told that it was their understanding that I threw it at the passing vehicle.  I was told I failed the polygraph and was subsequently fired.  The Internal Affairs captain at the time specifically told me that I would receive my accrued annual leave and my police certification would remain intact.  Approximately two weeks later, I was denied my annual leave because I was terminated for misconduct and was informed that the department turned in a request to have my certification revoked from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.  In the meanwhile this sergeant left the department to work at the academy.

I appealed this decision to the academy only to find out that I did not fail the polygraph and in the course of their investigation, they omitted several statements from officers on scene that supported my course of events.  However the academy failed to do an independent investigation of the situation and copied word for word what the investigation from the department revealed.  A so-called training counsel handed down the decision that my certification will remain revoked "now and forever."  I have one more chance to appeal this decision to an administrative law judge, however I have to hire an attorney and am currently out of work with no money coming in.  I was lucky enough to be hired by a small town police department but I am currently on unpaid administrative leave pending the outcome of this final appeal.  My wife works full time and is 8 months pregnant with our second child.  Although she is trying her best, she can not cover all our expenses and attorney fees.  She is also a very high risk pregnancy so medical bills are piling up now. My goal is to make sure that states such as South Carolina that are without police unions think twice before going after the little man.  Please donate to this legal fund so I can make sure that no department or state academy can take away an individual's livlihood for frivilous and vindictive reasons.