Philadelphia Police Detective John Logan was arrested yesterday for giving away evidence to people that were owned money by the department in lieu of paying them. Now he faces charges of tampering with public records, obstruction, and misapplying entrusted property. We are not sure what items Logan is accused of giving away at this time or if those items were needed for ay cases currently pending before the court. Logan was 32 year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) and was working with the Major Crimes Auto Squad until he retired the day before his arrest.
Sgt. Eric Gripp claims that the PPD is limited as to what they can release about Logan's case because of his retirement. If that is true it might explain why he retired. Usually police retire right before being disciplined or arrested in order to secure their pensions, but we found out recently that Pennsylvania has a law that takes away pensions when a public employee uses their position to commit a felony. The charges Logan is facing are misdemeanors, but that same statute also disqualifies people for certain misdemeanor convictions including "misapplication of entrusted property." This past week we were called out on Reddit for mistakenly stating that we thought another officer had retired to secure his pension before his arrest and people pointed out that we were wrong due to a relatively new law known as Act 1 of 2019 (see PDF uploaded with this article). However, we are not aware of any reason why retiring would limit what the PPD could release about an arrest. If anything one would think that his retirement would make it easier for the department to release more information, but maybe that change in his status from a public employee to a private citizen grants him more rights. It is also possible that Sgt. Gripp is just making up an excuse to justify releasing few details at this time.
Detective Logan is the fifth PPD officer to be arrested in the past month. Earlier this week Officer Charles Young was arrested for sexually assaulting an 8th grader (https://copblaster.com/blast/34428/officer-charles-young-arrested-for-sexually-assaulting-8th-grader) , earlier this month Officer Gregory Campbell was arrested for driving drunk into a house injuring two people (https://copblaster.com/blast/34429/philadelphia-cop-gregory-campbell-crashed-into-a-house-drunk), the week before Officer Ahmad Abuali was arrested for violating a protective order (https://copblaster.com/blast/34432/philly-officer-ahmad-abuali-arrested-for-violating-protective-order), and last month Officer Rahim Montgomery was arrested for statutory rape (https://copblaster.com/blast/34403/philadelphia-officer-rahim-montgomery-arrested-for-statutory-rape). This led us to briefly consider opening a physical storefront office in downtown Philadelphia to accept complaints of police misconduct in that city, but we decided against it due to COVID-19 after realizing the high likelihood of a super spreader event from people lining up around the block.