New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick has fired the same veteran officer for the second time in two months, accusing him of lying about filing an anonymous complaint about a non-existent cheating scandal that blocked other officers’ promotions and led former Mayor LaToya Cantrell to plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about it.
Chad Cockerham is a 17-year veteran officer who served on the NOPD’s FBI task force. In a termination letter Tuesday, Kirkpatrick wrote that Cockerham has changed his stories about how his personal computer could have been used to file an anonymous complaint about a cheating scandal that was later debunked.
The chief wrote that she found his shifting explanations – from other police officers using his computer to one of his family members making the complaint without his knowledge – “incredulous to me.”…