It happens in every profession and every walk of life – one person’s poor choices and ill-thought-out actions make everyone around them look bad. (After all, we’re lawyers – we’ve heard ALL the bad lawyer jokes!) But as one former Detroit cop is learning in the wake of a sentence for racketeering charges, this is so often the case with the police as well.
While most of them are good, hard working men and women who take their jobs very seriously, the ones that tend to make the news are the one’s whose personal struggles and failings have led them to chose a different path. And what makes this even more tragic, is the fact that all their brothers and sisters in blue pay the price in the form of a tarnished reputation and decreasing public respect.
Jackson’s role was to file claims of identity theft
41-year-old Tamboura Jackson of Clinton Township was accused in 2013 of filing false police reports as part of an ongoing scheme to improve credit scores for clients of Bright Star Consulting. Apparently Jackson’s friend and co-defendant Lisa Curtis was the owner of the Waterford-based company involved in the fraudulent claims. Jackson’s role was to file claims of identity theft for her clients in order to help them achieve higher credit scores.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, Curtis charged her clients fees that ranged from $200 to $1,000 for the job of raising their credit ratings, and also paid Jackson bribery money for each report he filed. Jackson was suspended from the Detroit Police Department, and later resigned from his post.
Just days before Christmas, a jury convicted him of bribery, forgery and racketeering, the last of which is a very serious crime under Michigan law. He was sentenced to a minimum of two and a half years in prison, up to a maximum of twenty.
His former co-conspirator on the other hand, Curtis, pled guilty to bribery of a public officer. But in return for her testimony against Jackson, was sentenced to only a probationary period of two years.