Jerry Oliver ran Richmond’s police department for seven years before he was hired as Detroit's chief in 2002. Oliver says he was the first top cop recruited from outside the region in a half century.

Very quickly the standard media description for Oliver went from “reform-minded police chief” to “controversial police chief.”

He was drummed out of office in October 2003. The official reason for his resignation was a gun found in his luggage at Metro Airport.

As we learned from the

, that official reason for forcing Oliver’s resignation may have been little more than a Team Kilpatrick ruse to rid itself of a chief who mistakenly believed the Detroit Police Department exists to provide law enforcement instead of the political favor bank that Kilpatrick wanted.

Once Oliver was gone, Kilpatrick was able to replace him with Ella Bully-Cummings, a third-rate yes woman whose primary responsibility was to ensure rank-and-file officers knew

.

But in his August, 2010 Tamara Greene deposition, Oliver suggests that opposition to his administration among Detroit’s leadership class went beyond the Kilpatrick flunkies. He blames then-Wayne County Prosecutor and current Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan for engineering the controversy over the gun incident.

Oliver describes the situation as essentially a paperwork error. He said that an assistant neglected to fill out a required disclosure form with the airline, but Duggan, as well as the Kilpatrick loyalists, used the misstep to get rid of him.

Remember, the reform effort Oliver spoke of wasn’t an arbitrary overhaul. It was required as part of a federal consent decree. The process, which began in 2003, was supposed to have been completed over an 18-month period. Nearly nine years later, the department reports as recently as

that it’s “making progress” to comply with federal expectations.

Jerry Oliver could be viewed as a quintessential disgruntled ex-employee, and his criticism of Duggan might be an attempt to deflect responsibility for his own mistakes.

However, the text message transcripts confirm Duggan’s enthusiasm for going after the chief for the gun incident.

What’s more, at other times the text record show Kilpatrick and Duggan working together to put out the fire created by former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown’s dismissal and subsequent whistle blower lawsuit.

None of which should be surprising. Duggan, like Kilpatrick’s father Bernard Kilpatrick, were key deputies to Wayne County’s long-time Executive Ed McNamara. The “AG” referenced in Ruth Carter’s text was Mike Cox, who (surprise!) had been a top assistant prosecutor in Duggan’s office.

Looking beyond Kilpatrick, Wayne County's Turkia Mullin’s severance scandal also connects to Duggan’s “coaching tree.”

Azzam Elder, who approved the severance,

, and

work or worked for Duggan’s DMC or McNamara’s Wayne County administration.

If this city and this region were spinning like a top, perhaps we could accept the cliquish, insular leadership culture, but this is Detroit. Maybe—just spit-balling here—but maybe in the midst of all the local problems and controversies, we should be embracing fresh ideas from out-of-the-box leaders.

It seemed to work out well for the auto industry.

Unfortunately, true reformers, as Jerry Oliver presents himself, just don’t have a chance trying to clean up a pool patrolled by sharks like Kilpatrick and Duggan.