FAIRHOPE, Alabama—Although a much-anticipated report Wednesday about the Fairhope Police Department may have raised more questions than given answers, it did put to rest concerns that the department was a potentially dangerous place to work, according to the City Council president.

Those claims of a potentially dangerous working environment were made by Mayor Tim Kant following a private meeting he conducted July 26 with several police employees at a local fire station.

Lorenzo Howard, a city personnel board member appointed by the council last month as a human resources specialist to assess allegations of intimidation, harassment and a hostile work environment at the department, told the council that based on his interviews of police officers, such statements of a potentially dangerous working environment were not made seriously.

Immediately after the oral report was presented Wednesday in an open meeting, Council President Lonnie Mixon said he was satisfied that such a dangerous working environment or situation did not exist, at least to the degree Kant described in a story published July 29 by The Fairhope Courier.

In that article, Kant said, “I was told that somebody could get hurt.”

Mixon said no immediate steps would be taken as a result of Howard’s report.

“We’ll need to think about it some and digest it,” he said. “I don’t see anything the council can do right offhand.”

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series about Lorenzo Howard’s report on the Fairhope Police Department.