Funny how Alan Dreher turns a negative into a positive when he’s angling for the top police job in Winston-Salem:

Dreher said that his experience handling controversial cases includes an incident in Atlanta in which narcotics officers shot a 92-year-old woman. Two of the officers pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, admitting they lied to get search warrants for her house and planted drugs after the botched raid.

A third officer was convicted Tuesday of lying to investigators in the case.

“It was important that you bring the community in and let them know exactly what happened,” Dreher said. “We’ve been dealing with the communities and talking about it. Obviously there’s a lot of frustration in the community, but it’s all about being accessible and being there.”

Let them know exactly what happened, huh? That’s not how a lot of people remember it. In fact, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko sums it up thusly:

Well, we all now know that just about everything Dreher said was wrong. Dreher was presiding over a corrupt narcotics unit that routinely lied on search warrant affidavits, harassed and intimidated informants, covered up mistakes, and was subject to damaging arrest and raid quotas that encouraged shortcuts and circumventing the checks in place to ensure the protection of civil rights. It was Dreher who spoke too soon, propagating the lie told to him by his officers that Johnston was some sort of dope-slinging, gun-toting granny.

Winston-Salem deserves a lot better than Dreher!