Two former East Cleveland police officers have been sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of robbery and one count of theft in office.
Willie Warner-Sims and his partner Alfonzo Cole were accused of stealing over $14,000 from drivers they pulled over during traffic stops. 32-year-old Sims and 35-year-old Cole took advantage of six civilians between July 2020 and July 2021. The officers were caught after a complaint was filed with the East Cleveland Police Department by a 21-year-old man who claimed the pair took $4,000 from him during a routine traffic stop at a local gas station on July 8, 2021. The money pocketed was intended to cover funeral services for the man’s recently deceased mother. It would later be discovered that Sims conducted another traffic stop on July 8 in which he forcibly removed a driver from his vehicle before ransacking it and stealing $781. Sims and Cole were arrested the day after the reported theft.
An investigation into the officers found that both Cole and Sims participated in several similar crimes and forgery of higher-ranked law enforcement over one year.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Michael J. Russo criticized the former police officers during their sentencing. “The one person that the public should be able to have confidence in … would be your emergency services, your police officers, your firefighters, your EMTs.”
Russo continued, “You’ve shaken the confidence of the public in the criminal justice system and the trust they put in police officers.”
A department-wide investigation into the East Cleveland Police Department uncovered corruption, fraud, money laundering, and records-tampering leading up the chain of command to Police Chief Scott Gardner, proving that Cole and Sims are just one part of a larger law enforcement problem in the area.
“When a[n] individual who is a police officer has taken that oath, he, in essence, is in a criminal category of his own,” Russo continued. “He, in effect, is a traitor to the system. He’s far worse than your normal burglar or robber or criminal.”
In addition to his two-year sentence, Cole was ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.
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