Detective Targeted For Displaying Gypsy Certificate Document Shows Police Bias, Gypsy Spokesman Contends
A Spokane police detective is the target of an internal affairs investigation for posting a certificate at work that declares her, “Princess of the Gypsies.”
Police administrators and officials from the city manager’s office want to know where Cheryl Graves got the certificate and why she put it up at work.
“It’s obviously inappropriate,” Police Chief Terry Mangan said Friday.
Graves, a 26-year member of the force, will remain on the job while the internal affairs investigation is under way, said Dick Cottam, police spokesman.
The city of Spokane is embroiled in a $40 million civil rights lawsuit with a local Gypsy family. The suit stems from 1985 police raids on several homes owned by the Marks family of Spokane.
A federal judge later ruled the raids, which were part of a stolen property investigation, illegal.
Attorneys for the Marks family subpoenaed the certificate and plan to use it at a pretrial hearing, which is scheduled to begin Monday.
Family spokesman Jimmy Marks said the document shows the police department is biased against his family.
“The Spokane Police Department has a taste of Mark Fuhrman in it. They’re prejudiced,” he said. “The document speaks for itself about what they think about Gypsies.”
The certificate reads: “Cheryl A. Graves is on this date made an honorary princess of the Machwaya Tribe Gypsies. With all the rights and privileges of a princess of the Gypsies. To partake in congames (sic) and swindles. To travel anywhere she pleases/and to take as many men as she wants.”
The document is dated Jan. 7, 1997, and is signed by John “Nick” Nicholas, a sheriff’s deputy from Florida who held a seminar on Gypsy culture in the Inland Northwest earlier this year.
Marks said Friday the wording “outrages me and my people.”
“We’ve been fighting for 11 years the stereotypes of Gypsies as tramps and thieves,” he said. “This is appalling to our wives and our daughters. I’m so angry, I could spit lemons.”
Graves said Nicholas, himself a Gypsy, sent her the certificate as “a tease.”
She said she and her husband had lunch and dinner with the man when he was in town. Nicholas taught her several things about Gypsies so she could do her job better and be more sensitive to the culture, she said.
“This has nothing to do with being anti-Gypsy. The whole point was, not all Gypsies are like that,” Graves said. “If this gets blown out of proportion, it’s because of a bunch of little-minded people. It certainly wasn’t meant to be derogatory. If someone says I’m anti-Gypsy, I will stand anywhere and say they’re lying.”
, DataTimes