JENKS – If new Police Chief Cameron Arthur meets with controversy in his job, it won’t be the first time.
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Arthur acknowledges that the time he spent as police chief in Galena, Kan., which ended in his firing, was the hardest time of his career.
He describes the small, southeastern Kansas town as ridden with poverty, meth labs and sex offenders – a place he says seems to be the opposite of Jenks, where the RiverWalk Crossing was a big enticement to him.
“I liked what I saw. It was night and day to Galena,” Arthur told the Tulsa World. “I wanted a place that would be as good a fit for my family as me.”
Arthur said previous police officers in Galena were corrupt and that he had to work to restore relationships with federal agencies.
In one year, he said, his officers busted 122 meth labs and made the “bad guys” mad in the former mining town, whose dwindling population is about 3,100.
“We made some waves,” he said.
Perhaps the most heat he faced in Galena was over the suicide of private investigator Jim Potts on Aug. 26, 2003. Potts reportedly had been hired to investigate the Galena Police Department on allegations of police brutality.
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When Potts was found shot behind the ear on the side of a highway south of Galena, some insisted that he had been murdered. But investigators from agencies that included the Cherokee County (Kan.) Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation considered the death a suicide.
Arthur said he had never even met Potts and expressed doubt that he was really conducting an investigation.
He said he asked the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to review a case in which a drug suspect’s arm was broken by one of his officers.
“I wanted there to be no perception of wrongdoing,” Arthur said.
The agency ruled that the use of force was justified.
Arthur was fired later that year for insubordination in connection with an allegation that he sold Galena police patches on the online auction site eBay.
He sued the city and was awarded a settlement of more than $100,000.
Galena Mayor Dale Oglesby said the settlement “cost us a train load of money.”
Oglesby said rumors were rampant but never substantiated when Arthur was police chief and that the town council was under pressure to fire him.
The eBay allegation, however, was pretty much “BS,” he said.
“I had worked with Cameron, and, frankly, I had not had the issues some of them had,” Oglesby said. “I don’t consider Cameron a bad guy at all.”
Still, he said it was probably best that Arthur moved on because of all the animosity.
The mayor said he didn’t think Galena had a worse drug problem than other towns and that the Police Department has always had an “aggressive policy” against drugs.
Arthur said his style of leadership is “firm yet fair.”
“I’m not that ‘I-got-ya’ kind of chief,” he said.
Jenks City Manager Mike Tinker said he discussed the incidents in Galena with Arthur thoroughly before he invited him to visit Jenks.
“I am convinced he was an effective chief of police in a town that had a certain population that did not want their illegal activities disrupted by local law enforcement,” Tinker said.
Arthur comes to Jenks with many letters of praise from residents, city managers, chiefs and co-workers, Tinker said.
He also was impressed by Arthur’s variety of career experience, which includes stints at police departments in Kansas City, Mo., and Breckenridge, Colo., a tourist town, as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and in the private sector as director of public safety and security at ITT Technical Institute in Carmel, Ind.
Arthur succeeds Don Selle, who took an investigative position in Hawaii with the Department of Human Services.
