Chester police move to City Hall after rift with sheriff’s office

The Chester Police Department moved out of the law enforcement building Thursday it had shared with the Chester County Sheriff’s Office after a rift between the two agencies over office space.

The problem over who would use two offices vacated when the police department’s major retired and its chief resigned has been churning for weeks, but the conflict came to a head when the city’s police officers packed up and moved downtown to City Hall.

City Administrator Sandi Worthy said the move was prompted by concerns two police employees raised at the last City Council meeting.

“They spoke about threats of being arrested if they try to go into offices that are now commandeered by the Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “It was a very tense environment that we no longer wanted to be a part of.”

Sheriff Alex Underwood said no such threats were made by any of his employees and that he hadn’t heard claims of any threats until Thursday morning when the Police Department began packing up

Underwood, who said he was surprised by the city’s abrupt move Thursday, told The Herald he spoke with Worthy two weeks ago about using the vacated office space for his agency.

“My people are crowded,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense for certain individuals to have two offices.”

Underwood said the city was never asked to move from the complex and that his request to reclaim the two offices would only relocate a city employee back to the office in which she was originally assigned.

Keisha Tobias, the Chester police public information officer, said that before former Chief Andre Williams left, he reassigned her to the office vacated when Maj. Gene Gilmore retired. She had been using the office for two or three weeks when, she said, the locks were changed.

“One day, the doors were locked,” she said. “What do you do if your office is locked? You don’t have a key.”

Tobias said no one from the Sheriff’s Office ever spoke to her or threatened her over the office dispute.

“I was locked out,” she said. “The state statute states if you don’t have custody or a key to something and you enter it, that is breaking and entering. You don’t have the key and you enter something without permission, that is breaking and entering. That could be trespassing.”

Worthy, who said she at one point had “free range” in the building, can no longer access the building with her key because the Sheriff’s Office has changed locks to some doors.

Underwood said locks on the two office spaces in question were changed because the former police chief changed the locks that were originally there a year or so ago.

The new locks weren’t up to fire code, Underwood said, so the Sheriff’s Office changed them back to the locks originally on the doors in the county-owned building. In a news release Thursday afternoon, Underwood said city employees were made aware of the lock change and “have never been denied access to retrieve anything from those two offices.”

Worthy said there ha been some dissension between the two agencies, particularly in the last four years.

Underwood and Tobias each said their agencies have co-existed peacefully in the building, and Underwood said the departments both recently conducted training.

Employees from several city departments – including finance, human resources, parks and recreation, public works – and Worthy herself were loading trucks at the law enforcement complex and unloading them at City Hall on Thursday. Some uniformed officers were assisting. Tobias said they hoped to have the entire move completed in one day.

Underwood called the city’s claim that he has no regard for staff or police “bogus.”

“Since I took office, I have included the city police in all aspects of my departmental training, programs and functions,” he said. “They have never paid a dime for any of this, including other necessary services. We have assisted them whenever requested and even when they did not.”

Chester County Supervisor Shane Stuart said the county tried last year to get the city to sign a memorandum of understanding regarding the law enforcement complex but the city refused.

This story was originally published July 30, 2015 at 1:36 PM with the headline "Chester police move to City Hall after rift with sheriff’s office."