Tim Tinnin — a former Overland Park Police sergeant who resigned last year following accusations that he and three other officers misused a police charity’s funds — is now a sheriff’s deputy one county over.
Douglas County Sheriff Jay Armbrister, in an email, said that Tinnin started working for his agency in early January. He also said Tinnin was open about his resignation in his application to the agency and that the department “focused on it as part of a background investigation.”
“Given the news coverage and what he disclosed about the case,” Ambrister said, “the Sheriff’s Office examined it deeply, including interviews with individuals with intimate knowledge of the details of the investigation. Their overwhelming belief was that Deputy Tinnin specifically had done nothing wrong and faced no criminal charges because of it.”
Tinnin started with the Overland Park Police Department in early 2011 as a patrol officer, and he became a sergeant in 2019.
He was a sergeant at the time he and the other three officers were placed on paid administrative leave in 2022 pending an investigation related to the alleged misappropriation of funds within the Overland Park Police Officers’ Foundation they led.
The other officers in the investigation were Sgt. Brandon Faber, Officer Brad Heater and Sgt. Rachel Scattergood. Earlier this year, Scattergood was briefly hired by the Gladstone Police Department in Missouri but was dismissed shortly after.
Operation of the police charity, which is the philanthropic division of the Overland Park Fraternal Order of Police, was suspended after new foundation leadership discovered suspicious activity involving some funds.
A partially redacted audit, released last year, suggested that the board members had violated the charity’s bylaws and disbursed thousands of dollars to themselves, including paying for a gift card to a resort and a $1,000 veterinary bill.
An attached summary released by the Overland Park FOP also slammed the officers for failing to keep good records.
All told, the audit showed what appeared to be roughly $27,000 in funds directly appropriated to Tinnin, Scattergood, Heater and Faber.
Of the four officers, Tinnin appears to have received the smallest amount of funds from the foundation, per the audit. One of the disbursements to Tinnin — totalling $2,000 — was made in 2020, after he stopped serving on the foundation’s leadership board. The other, a $1,000 payment, would have occurred while he was still a foundation officer.
In all, Faber received $6,000, Scattergood received $6,540.81, and Heater received $11,600, according to the audit.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe’s office declined to bring criminal charges against the four, though he called their collective behavior “shadowy.”
In his email to the Post, Sheriff Armbrister said the background investigation into Tinnin did reveal that he violated the charity’s bylaws by having funds distributed to him on one occasion while he was a foundation officer.
At the time, Tinnin’s wife, a firefighter, was pregnant and “placed off work,” which reduced her pay, according to Armbrister, and resulted in the family needing “assistance with bills.”
That being said, Armbrister said Tinnin was unaware that the receipt went against the charity’s rules because he “had not fully read and understood the bylaws.”
“It was only learned much later that the bylaws prohibited board members from receiving these funds, and if we are looking for a place to say someone made a mistake, it is here,” Armbrister said. “But in no way was it ever shown that it was Tim’s intent to receive money from the foundation while knowing that he was prohibited.”
The second disbursement to Tinnin, since it came after his time as a foundation officer, didn’t violate any of the bylaws, Armbrister added.
“This is an example where a good person did what they thought was right in order to help his family,” he said. “We believe Tim deserves an opportunity to show this is not who he is. Frankly, he has done exactly that every day since coming to work with us.”
However, Armbrister said the background investigation into Tinnin as part of his hiring and those findings do not necessarily clear the other three officers of wrongdoing.
“We DO NOT know what went on with ANY other payments from that foundation, but we do know no charges were filed for any of them,” he wrote to the Post.
The city of Overland Park was also investigating the officers, and they were on paid leave until they all resigned late last year.
In Kansas, police departments or other law enforcement agencies have to report an officer’s departure to the state’s Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training. That process includes a form that describes the circumstances of their separation.
For instance, as is the case here, a department would need to list if someone resigned voluntarily or under questionable circumstances.
Previously, Overland Park spokesperson Meg Ralph told the Post the city submitted forms that said the officers, including Tinnin, had resigned “under questionable circumstances.”
At the time of publication, the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training had not completed the Post’s request for certification records on Tinnin, Faber, Scattergood and Heater.
This story was originally published by the Johnson County Post.
