Knowing Of Allegations, Warminster Offered DARE Officer A Secret Retirement Deal: Report

WARMINSTER, PA — When the Warminster Board of Supervisors announced James Carey's retirement at a meeting in 2009, there was no mention that the police officer had twice been fired — nor that he had been the subject of three investigations in five years around alleged inappropriate contact with minors.

According to a report published by the Bucks County Courier Times on Thursday, the board of supervisors also left off the record a nearly $40,000 per year disability pension which the township had agreed to provide Carey in retirement.

While Carey was investigated for allegations of inappropriate contact with underage boys during his career, none of those investigations led to criminal charges. Now, the former officer faces more than 100 charges, as five men — now in their 30s and 40s — have come forward accusing him of sexual abuse when they were teenage boys.

"When you are that young and something like that happens, the self-value of yourself isn't very high," one man testified. "It destroyed my life."

The allegations span Carey's 20-year police career in Warminster, according to the District Attorney's Office. A D.A.R.E. and school resource officer, Carey was hired in 1989 and first investigated in 2001 over "concerning conduct" with minors. He was fired in 2005, reinstated in 2006, and quietly fired again in 2007, the Courier Times investigation found.

The retirement agreement is a common way to deal with problem officers, according to experts.

“It’s a relatively painless way for everybody to make an officer go away because they’re going to get money for the rest of their lives, so they’re willing to sign off and go away,” Thomas L. Heimbach, an Allentown labor law attorney, told the Courier Times.

Read the full investigative report by Jo Ciavaglia in the Bucks County Courier Times: Warminster couldn't fire troubled cop James Carey. So it offered him a secret retirement deal.