The mayor of Oakland, Calif, relieved the city’s interim police chief of his duties Wednesday, less than a week after he was appointed to the post amid a widening sex scandal in the police department.
(FOX)- Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters that she had “received information that has caused me to lose confidence in Ben Fairow’s ability to lead the Oakland Police Department at this particular moment in time.” Schaaf went on to call Fairow’s hiring a mistake and said she should have taken more time to vet the officer.
Schaaf said state personnel laws prohibited her from elaborating on why she felt compelled to remove Fairow. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Police Chief Kenton Rainey said later Wednesday he had welcomed Fairow back to his department and that Fairow had informed him he had an affair with a consenting adult while married more than a decade ago.
That doesn’t preclude “him from serving as a sworn law enforcement officer or as one of my Deputy Chiefs,” Rainey said.
Fairow, who previously spent 21 years as an officer in Oakland, was appointed after Chief Sean Whent resigned last Thursday after news of the scandal broke.
An 18-year-old woman has alleged in multiple news media interviews that two dozen current and former officers in five cities had sex with her while she worked as a prostitute. Encounters with three of the officers took place when she was a minor, the woman has said.
Before his sudden resignation last week, former chief Whent revealed that an Oakland officer’s September suicide had led the department’s internal affairs division to open an investigation into whether any current officers committed sexual misconduct with a minor.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.