BRADENTON – Bradenton Police Chief Melanie Bevan is speaking out after being exonerated of all wrongdoing after an internal investigation.
“I was unable to comment on anything and that was unfortunate, people heard other voices and they weren’t able to hear my voice, and my voice today is I was always confident, I’ve been a cop for 36 years, I know my job, I know the law, I know parameters, there’s not much that comes my way that I don’t have some sort of familiarity with,” said Bradenton Police Department Chief, Melanie Bevan.
The investigation into Chief Bevan was initiated after accusations of improper searches were filed from a former Bradenton Police Officer.
On Monday Mayor Gene Brown found no fourth amendment violations in connection with a sweep of a residence and the pat down of a male during an arrest on July 14.
“If you look at the photos or the body cam you are going to clearly see that the object protruding out of that young man’s pocket appeared to be the barrel of a firearm, there’s been a lot of discussion about ghost firearms lately, ghost guns and the size, width of that object that was in his pocket, If you look at the body cams, you don’t see me patting him down, you don’t see me looking all over, you see me zeroing on one thing and one thing only, which is what I thought was a weapon in his pocket, that is 101 of policing,” said Chief Bevan.
Chief Bevan says she does have one thing she regrets during the arrest on July 14th.
“There’s a general order that states that I don’t need to wear my vest, that I don’t need to have it on when we’re doing policing out there in the public, and that’s from captain on up, I had my vest with me, it was in the car, I’ve lost officers to gun violence, I recognize that it set a bad example, just because I don’t have to, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have,” said Chief Bevan.
Moving forward, Chief Bevan does believe there will need to be some rebuilding of trust within the agency
“My goal over the next months, weeks, is to ensure that everybody understands that we are on target, we’re still doing the job that you are paying us to do and were going to do it to the best of our abilities and those abilities are good,” said Chief Bevan
This case is now closed but the court battles are far from over. The patrol officer who filed the complaint, Hannah Kalchbrenner, is filing an unfair labor practice suit with the state public employees relations commission.
Kalchbrenner has resigned from the force along with her husband, who was also a Bradenton Police Officer.
