A former D.C. police worker who took money from people who received access to confidential traffic crash reports was sentenced to 78 days in jail for accepting the bribes and insurance fraud in a separate case.
Kendra Coles, 46, of Beltsville, Maryland, once worked with the department’s Patrol Services and School Safety Bureau. She will do her time behind bars on weekends, after the judge cited “mitigating factors” in outlining the sentence, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Columbia news release.
Back in 2015, prosecutors said Coles started working with so-called “runners,” who paid her more than $40,000 over a period of time to get their hands on Traffic Crash Reports.
The “runners” would in turn pass the information about the crash victims to attorneys seeking clients.
An D.C. police audio found Coles accessed the system more than 3,000 times between June and October 2017 alone to tap into the crash report data.
Separately, Coles conspired with a family friend to make her car “disappear” and set in on fire so she could file a false insurance claim. Coles was looking at expensive car repairs and unpaid parking tickets to cover and received more than $1,000 from her insurer after filing a false theft report.
Coles will also serve three years of probation and is also required to pay more than $6,000 in restitution to an insurance carrier, as well as a $40,000 forfeiture money judgment.
Back in May, another D.C. police employee was sentenced for illegally giving out personal information on traffic accident victims in exchange for more than $40,000 in cash bribes over a two-year period.
