[chris]

Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Officer Marcus Ramon Jackson, 25, was fired after his Dec. 30, 2009, arrest and later sentenced to 25 to 39 months in prison in cases involving six women he was accused of assaulting while on duty.

Jackson had been hired in September 2008 and was working out of the department's Eastway Division in east Charlotte. Chief Rodney Monroe said the accusations followed the same pattern: Jackson stopped women while in uniform and driving a marked patrol car, put them in his cruiser, drove them somewhere else and assaulted them.

Investigators corroborated the accounts using GPS data from his patrol car and video and audio recorded by cruiser cameras, WFAE reported, although not every encounter was captured. By the time the case reached court, eight women and two men had accused him of abusing his authority, according to WBTV.

A 17-year-old told investigators Jackson made her perform oral sex in his patrol car rather than write her a ticket, then turned up at her home at 3:30 a.m. and handed her identification to her mother at the door. Another woman had called 911 to report domestic violence, and police allege Jackson fondled her after he was dispatched to her call.

Recordings the department released in January 2010 cover a Dec. 29, 2009, stop and include both the 911 calls and the police radio traffic around them. The driver's boyfriend called 911 twice in six minutes, speaking Spanish through an interpreter, to report that an officer had stopped her and wanted to search her. Jackson is audible telling him to end the call, saying "Get off the phone" and "Hang up the phone, sir." Jackson then arrested the man and charged him with obstructing and delaying an officer. He spent six days in the Mecklenburg County jail before the charge was dropped.

Jackson was indicted on 11 counts, among them sexual battery, felonious restraint, kidnapping, extortion, indecent exposure and interfering with an emergency communication, and was held for about a year on bond of more than $400,000. On Dec. 9, 2010, he entered an Alford plea in cases involving six women, acknowledging that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict without admitting guilt. A conviction on all counts at trial could have carried nearly 29 years. He was ordered to register as a sex offender and was released from state prison on May 24, 2012.

Monroe acknowledged that Jackson should never have been hired, saying a 2003 domestic violence protective order was found in his background check but not acted on and a second order from 2005 was missed. "The information was there for us to see and it was not properly reviewed," Monroe said. Two lawsuits filed in February 2011 alleged Monroe had personally intervened to keep Jackson on the force after a July 2009 patrol car wreck and after Jackson broke down the door of his estranged wife's apartment that September. The city settled with several of the women, including a $350,000 payment to the 17-year-old, and a federal judge in Charlotte ordered Jackson on June 10, 2013, to pay two others $100,000 each in compensatory damages and $300,000 each in punitive damages. Jackson did not attend that hearing.