Former Parma Cop: New Mayor’s Relatives Have Active Warrants

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One of the Parma, Mo., police officers who resigned when the city’s first black female mayor took office, said that he feared Mayor Tyrus Byrd might give special treatment to her family members who allegedly have outstanding warrants.

An unnamed police officer told Missouri television station KFVS that he was concerned about messages from Byrd’s family members on social media about what they might do when Byrd took office.

“These posts were made by people that had active warrants through our city, and they were claiming it is now safe to return to Parma now that they have family that’s the mayor now,” the officer told KFVS.

The officer said that the five police officers who resigned when Byrd took office were not prompted to do so because of race.

“If I was going to lose my job anyways, I might as well start looking,” the officer told KFVS about his decision to resign.

Parma’s former assistant police chief, Rich Medley, also told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he quit because he worried that Byrd would interfere in his job, citing negative experiences with Byrd’s relatives.

“Rather than put my life in danger more than I do now on a daily basis, I decided to walk away,” the officer told the Post-Dispatch.

In an interview with TPM, former Parma Mayor Randall Ramsey said that he believes city officials resigned because they assumed that they would be fired. Ramsey, who lost the election by 37 votes after serving as mayor for a total of 37 years, said that rumors were flying about Byrd firing current city officials. Ramsey said that Byrd only asked one official to stay.

“They didn’t ask anybody else to stay,” Ramsey told TPM. “So assumptions were made that they were going to be fired.”

Byrd has said that she never suggested that she was going to fire any officials.

“I never said anything about cleaning house,” she told the Post-Dispatch.

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