Chris Brown may finally get his comeuppance. As SPIN noted earlier, “significant discrepancies” were found in the Hall of Shame all-star‘s community service record related to his 2009 assault against Rihanna. Coincidentally, TMZ reports that the police chief who signed off on Brown’s allegedly finished community service hours has resigned.
Bryan Norwood, Chief of Police in Richmond, Virginia, certified in a letter to the court that the Fortune singer completed his sentence, but Los Angeles prosecutors filed a motion on February 5 demanding that Brown re-do his service in L.A. The court reported “at best sloppy documentation and at worst fraudulent reporting” in Breezy’s labor records. Norwood was reportedly solely responsible for the self-described martyr‘s probation case, taking it over from the Richmond Probation Department. Now, the Mayor of Richmond has said that his office and Norwood have reached a “mutual agreement” regarding the police chief’s resignation.
Apparently, rumors that Norwood would resign for a similar position in Raleigh, North Carolina have been circulating for weeks, but local sources for TMZ speculate that the ongoing Brown controversy sped up the lawman’s decision.
The judge in Rihanna’s assault case wants Brown to verify that he did in fact complete his community service. If he can’t, then the always irascible R&B star would be in violation of his probation. As the Los Angeles Times reports, if Brown doesn’t fulfill his court-ordered community service, he could be sent to jail.
Back in 2009, after pleading no contest to a felony battery charge, Brown was sentenced to a year-long domestic violence class, five years probation, and more than 180 days of labor-oriented service. The 23-year-old Grammy winner was allowed to carry out the community service in Virginia, where he lives.
Brown’s lawyers responded to the prosecutors’ accusations last week by saying the L.A. County District Attorney’s office had committed a fraudulent investigation into the singer’s service record. According to the L.A. Times, Brown’s attorney said there are “countless examples” of Virginia officials witnessing his client perform community service-related tasks, including shredding documents at Richmond’s police headquarters and cleaning the department’s stables.
“Exactly what the D.A. claimed is absolutely false,” Brown’s attorney, Mark Geragos said. “And I don’t mean false, I mean fraudulent.”
The prosecutors’ 19-page report alleges that Brown claims to have performed service on days when he was confirmed to be elsewhere — in some cases, not even in the country. MTV singles out several instances: In October 2010, Brown claimed to be doing community service when he was actually at a charity basketball game; on another day in March 2012, Breezy said he picked up trash for eight hours but airline records show he was on his way to Cancun, Mexico; in December 2011, rather than cleaning garbage, Brown was at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., coming back from a trip to Dubai.
And though Brown was allowed to perform the service in his home state of Virginia, prosecutors observed that the alleged service wasn’t conducted in the county where Brown lives, raising questions as to whether Richmond police were even qualified to supervise him. “Not one day or even one hour of his claimed community labor was performed in his own county or in his assigned probation supervision district,” the D.A.’s filing reads (via the L.A. Times).
