Hastings Police Officer
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Former officer charged for bogus tickets
As Hastings has burst at the seams with new people, homes, and businesses, local traffic has gone through the roof too. The police chief says the city council and citizens have made monitoring that traffic a priority, so he has too. "We expect in their 11 hour shift, they (police officers) should be out there making at least two traffic contacts," explained Chief Mike McMenomy. "It's not a quota in the fact they're not required to write tickets and generate revenue for the city, it's just a traffic contact. They can write tickets or warnings at their discretion." One former Hastings police sergeant apparently used that discretion for unethical ends. 38 year old Valerie Scharfe stands charged with Misconduct by a public officer or official, for allegedly writing 37 bogus warning tickets, apparently to keep her performance up to department standards. The practice came up in early January, when a clerk discovered irregularities in Scharfe's paper work. "On trying to enter them into the system, the names and info on the tickets didn't match," said McMenomy, "like the license plate registration didn't match the name on the ticket. And so we started checking into those. Couldn't find any record of those people even existing." Investigators also say Scharfe wrote warning tickets for actual motorists she pulled out of her computer, drivers who have never been pulled over in Hastings. When informed of an internal investigation on her ticket writing practices, Scharfe handed in her resignation. The story has quickly spread across the community, triggering disbelief in some cases, anger in others. "I think it's an awful thing to do, and I think when you entrust somebody to protect and serve the citizens, it obviously violates that," opined Heather Jones-Peterson, a longtime Hastings resident. "I'm very happy somebody who makes those decisions is no longer on the street, and I hope the people who make the decisions to put the officers on the street look into the decisions they make a little bit further than that." The executive director of Minnesota's Peace Officer Standards and Training Board agrees, saying the case represents a flagrant abuse of the public trust. "It's a huge violation," says POST's Neil Melton. "You need to have respect and confidence that your police are acting objectively and impartially. At this point, the officers in Minnesota... and there's ten thousand three hundred of em out there... are probably reflecting on their own action when they're out there on the street."
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