Police Academy

The headaches just keep on coming for the Philadelphia Police Department. Two officers were recently arrested and kicked off the job in separate incidents, authorities said yesterday. Officer Brien Greene, 27, walked into a doughnut shop on 52nd Street near Market on Jan. 11 and became enraged at a female employee who was talking on the phone, a law-enforcement source said. Greene allegedly threw a trash can at the woman and another employee, pulled out a gun and said, "I'll f------ shoot you," the source said.

A Philadelphia police officer dabbed her eyes and withstood the urge to break down yesterday while telling a jury of how her childhood was polluted by a city police officer who forced her to engage in sex acts for more than eight years. Tyrone Wiggins, 51, began the attacks when she was a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Benjamin Rush Middle School, the now-25-year-old officer testified. "He showed me a porno [video] in his living room," the woman said under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti, on the first day of Wiggins' rape trial.

THE COPS didn't care who Jewell Williams was when they tightened the cuffs around his wrists and threw him into the back of a police cruiser. They didn't care that he had been trained at the same police academy that they graduated from. Or that, as a Temple University policeman, he had patrolled the same North Philadelphia streets they were patrolling. They knew he was a state representative. But that didn't keep them from rousting him like a common criminal for daring to question their authority.

The police radios chirped: Burglary in progress in Woodlynne. A woman came home to find a boyish stranger in an upstairs bedroom, holding her underwear. He ran before police arrived, but left a gray sweatshirt. Two shiny new Woodlynne squad cars raced to the home a block away. Officers called the Camden County Sheriff's Office for K-9 assistance. One Woodlynne officer carried out evidence in two brown paper bags. "I'm a little upset we didn't grab this guy," said Officer Walter Schilling, 36, now working in Woodlynne after having been laid off by the Winslow department.

The Philadelphia Police Department has had an utterly miserable year. This isn't news to anyone who has followed the headlines, each one more shocking than the one before - one cop caught robbing a drug dealer, another cop charged with killing a relative, and another busted for stealing from a bar. It's enough to make you forget that there are a lot of good officers out there who joined the force because they wanted to do some good in...

A New Jersey State Police sergeant accused of sexually harassing a recruit from Camden County has been cleared by an administrative law judge. Judge Donald Stein found no evidence that Sgt. Christine Shallcross verbally harassed Trooper Alexis Hayes at the Police Academy in 2005 or kissed her at graduation. But the judge ordered Shallcross suspended without pay for drawing on recruits' faces with markers and for driving a police vehicle after drinking. Shallcross' attorney, George Daggett, said that the suspension was for 75 days and that he planned to appeal it. "We're very pleased the judge saw through the false testimony of Alexis Hayes.

Chester County residents eager to learn the inner workings of the criminal justice system will have the chance when the first Chester County Citizens Police Academy begins next month. District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll said he had modeled the nine-month program after similar initiatives but tweaked the format to offer a wide range of topics, including accident reconstruction, Miranda rights, and evidence analysis. "We want to help people understand what we do - and why," he said.

The discovery of what appeared to be a torpedo under I-95 in Port Richmond caused some alarm this morning, but the object turned out to be a welded replica, police said. During a news conference at the Police Academy, Chief Inspector Joseph Sullivan said the object was not actual military ordnance and more likely was a novelty item. An X-ray showed it was hollow and it had no screws, as a torpedo would, he said. Although a replica, its discovery this morning caused a stir, with the police Bomb Squad responding and PennDot preparing to close I-95 if it turned out to be a live device.

Unable to get your law-enforcement fix on TV? Flirting with a career in police work? Just curious about crime in Chester County? If you fall into any of those categories, District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has a solution: the first Chester County Citizens Police Academy. Designed to provide county residents with an overview of the criminal-justice system, participants will spend two hours a month interacting with police officers, detectives, and prosecutors - without fear of being handcuffed.