The Ohio detective, Andrew K. Mitchell, 55, retired on March 13, two days after his arrest on federal charges that he kidnapped women and forced them to have sex with him, a police spokeswoman said Wednesday. Along with Mitchell, two other officers who had been in the vice unit were officially removed from their vice assignments after previously having been placed on desk jobs, police officials said.
In a video posted online late Tuesday, Thomas A. Quinlan, the interim police chief, said he had also notified the seven other vice officers that he was “abolishing their assignments,” adding that the vice unit was still under investigation.
“While today’s decision is not a reflection on all the officers assigned to vice, it has become clear there’s a better method of addressing the community’s needs when to it comes to the enforcement of prostitution, alcohol and gambling,” he said. “Soon I am meeting with the deputy chiefs to develop a new model for enforcement. Following this meeting, I will share the division’s plans with the community.”
The decision to disband the vice unit may help end a turbulent eight months for the Division of Police, which had mostly paused the vice unit’s operations and at one point changed police chiefs during the investigations. With its demise, the vice group joins a list of ignominious law enforcement teams (such as the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, a secret clique within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s elite gang unit and the Chicago Police Department’s Special Operations Section) that, over the years, have been accused of wrongdoing and ensnared their institutions in scandal.
Mayor Andrew J. Ginther of Columbus praised Quinlan’s move, saying it was a recognition that the unit had “lost the public’s trust.”
“Change and reform is hard but necessary to become the best of the best,” Ginther said Tuesday night on Twitter.
The vice unit of the Columbus Division of Police became the subject of national attention last July, when four of the unit’s detectives were sent to Sirens Gentlemen’s Club in northeastern Columbus to investigate complaints “alleging prostitution and drug activity,” according to court documents.
While dancing topless, Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, pressed patrons’ faces into her chest and fondled the breasts of some women in the audience, the detectives said, in affidavits. Daniels performed similar acts on three officers, and grabbed one by the buttocks, according to the affidavits. She was then arrested and charged with three counts of illegal sexually oriented activity, a misdemeanor.
However, those charges were dropped in under 24 hours, because the law under which Daniels was arrested applied to people who “regularly” appear nude or seminude at a particular establishment, and Clifford had not appeared at the club consistently.
Still, the episode raised the possibility that the arrest of Daniels, who by that time had gained nationwide prominence for her allegations that she had had an affair with President Donald Trump, had been politically motivated and caused some to wonder why undercover vice officers had been sent to the strip club in the first place. The police chief at the time, Kim Jacobs, quickly acknowledged that “a mistake was made” and promised to review “the motivations behind the officers’ actions.” (An internal review later found that allegations that there had been a political motivation behind the arrest of Daniels were “not sustained,” but the review did determine that the arrest was improper.)
Mitchell, a 31-year veteran of the Division of Police, was not one of the four detectives involved in Daniels’ arrest on July 11, the police spokeswoman, Sgt. Chantay Boxill, said Wednesday. Boxill said the arrest was one of several episodes that drew attention to the vice unit and eventually prompted an investigation into it.
In August, Mitchell was investigating a prostitution complaint when he fatally shot 23-year-old Donna Castleberry, the police said. According to police reports, Mitchell shot Castleberry multiple times while she was in his car after she stabbed him in the hand. (An investigation into Castleberry’s death is expected to go before a grand jury in April.)
In September, the vice unit, which at the time consisted of about 20 officers and supervisors, paused operations for a month while the division conducted an internal review of the unit. Asked at a news conference at the time whether the strip-club episode involving Daniels or the fatal shooting of Castleberry had resulted in the pause, Jacobs said that “everything’s related to it.”
As the four-week review period came to a close, Jacobs requested that the FBI’s Public Corruption Task Force take over the review — a request the bureau accepted. The pause on the vice unit’s work remained in effect, the police division said at the time.
Based on the FBI’s initial findings, three officers, Steven Rosser, Whitney Lancaster and Mitchell, were, at various points late last year, stripped of their guns and placed on desk duty pending the outcome of the investigation, Boxill said Wednesday. She added that the investigation was continuing.
A spokesman for the FBI’s Cincinnati field office did not immediately return a request for comment. Attempts to reach Rosser and Lancaster were not immediately successful.
After Jacobs retired in February, Ginther appointed Quinlan as interim chief.
His tenure was almost immediately greeted by scandal, when, last week, federal prosecutors announced that Mitchell had been arrested on charges that he kidnapped two women under the guise of arrest and forced them to have sex with him to gain their freedom. Mitchell kidnapped one woman in July 2017 and forced her to perform oral sex on him, according to the indictment handed down by a grand jury on March 7; on two separate occasions, in September 2017 and in the summer of 2018, he forced a second woman to have sex with him, it said.
The indictment also said that when Mitchell learned he was being investigated, he tried to tamper with witnesses and obstruct the investigation and also lied to federal prosecutors about having sex with prostitutes.
His lawyer, Mark Collins, has said Mitchell denies wrongdoing and will vigorously fight the case at trial. Collins did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment on Wednesday afternoon.
Shortly after the indictment was announced, Quinlan promised that Mitchell would be “held accountable for his actions.”
Mitchell was charged last week with three counts of deprivation of rights under color of law (the term for a crime committed by a police officer on duty), two counts of witness tampering, one count of obstructing justice and one count of providing a false statement to federal agents. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison. Mitchell remains in custody, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice said, and is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court for an arraignment on those charges Thursday morning.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.