Chatham County Sheriff responds to police chief’s criticism and SWAT team withdrawal

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - Sheriff Richard Coleman said he has not read a letter from Police Chief Jeff Hadley criticizing his leadership after the county police department withdrew its officers from the joint SWAT team.

Hadley sent a letter to Coleman calling the sheriff’s decision-making “shocking and perplexing”, and pointing to that a reason for withdrawing his officers from the team.

“I’m not going to dignify him with a response. There’s his version, my version, and there’s the truth,” Coleman said.

You can read the letter for yourself below:

Wedding incident sparks controversy

The letter from Hadley details an incident where a “Bear-Cat” armored vehicle was driven to and used at a private wedding. A video on social media showed at least nine people in wedding attire on top of the armored vehicle while it drove slowly down a street.

Hadley said Coleman allowing the incident with equipment purchased by Chatham County an embarrassment. Coleman said he didn’t know about the incident until seeing it on social media.

“When I heard about it, everyone else had heard about it. And we are dealing with the matter internally. And we’re looking into it,” Coleman said.

Coleman said the incident should not determine whether CCPD officers serve Chatham County citizens in emergency situations.

“You deal with it, you get to complain, you deal with it like any other complaint. But if you’re going to remove yourself because somebody’s standing on top of a car, and that’s the determining factor between you serving the citizens of Chatham County in an emergency situation, I won’t respond to that,” he said.

Coleman said he is focused on serving Chatham County citizens and has reached out to other area sheriffs for help staffing SWAT team vacancies left by the county police department’s withdrawal.

He said the SWAT team “won’t miss a beat”.

The county police department declined to provide an interview about the matter. They deferred us to their statement.