Vacations, credit card debt: Wichita police accountant was stealing, court records allege
A Wichita police associate accountant had been taking money for years to pay for credit card debt, taxes, a new home and vacations, according to allegations in a court document.
The theft was discovered after donated dollars for Wichita school district playground equipment didn’t add up.
Shauna Marie Dickman was charged with two counts of theft in April.
She turned in money she was being investigated for, including reportedly finding some of the few thousand dollars in an envelope at her desk, the same days she made large withdrawals from her bank, according to a probable cause arrest affidavit.
However, an audit found her deposits over several years were still $39,653.45 short from money that the police department collected from fingerprinting, application fees for a private security license and donations.
In a Facebook message, Dickman told a coworker and friend that she made a mistake.
“I did something really stupid and dumb,” she wrote, according to the court document. “I owned up to it, but there are consequences for my actions. I did resign. I’m a mess, but it’s my own doing ... please know that I am not a bad person, just a human who made a very stupid mistake.”
Here’s what the court document alleges happened:
The missing dollars were discovered after the Wichita Police Foundation noticed the dollars raised in a June 3, 2022 fundraiser, didn’t add up to what the organization received. The golf tournament raised funds for playground equipment for the Wichita school district.
The $2,170 raised in cash was never deposited into the bank.
Dickman turned in those dollars on March 7, 2023, after she reportedly found that money in an envelope in her desk. That same day she made a withdrawal from her personal bank account for $1,850.
During the inquiry into those missing dollars, city officials also found $1,745 missing from a July 24, 2021, fundraising raffle for school supplies.
Dickman turned that money in on March 9, 2023, when she submitted her resignation letter. She withdrew $1,750 from her personal bank account that day.
An audit was conducted going back to 2018. Dickman had worked for the city since 2001. It’s unclear why the audit didn’t go back further.
The investigation also showed that Dickman and her husband were having money problems.
Her husband wrote to her city email in May 2019 that he was worried how they were going to get out of credit card debt, pay taxes, pay for trips that month and November all while trying to buy a new house.
He wrote her again in July 2019 asking how she paid the full amount to the IRS. She replied that it was money she earned outside of work and she saved it back as a surprise.
That same month, cash deposits from the police division that gets money from fingerprinting application fees for a private security license were $2,958 short.
The amount of money supposed to be deposited by Dickman was short over the several years of the audit. These were the amounts:
2018: $13,815
2020: $16,947.23
2021: $455
2022: $6,418
2023: $270
There was another $1,748.22 “in cash missing from donations that Dickman indicated she received.”
Dickman now apparently works for a church. A staff directory on Pathway Church Westlink’s website on Saturday listed her as an administrative assistant.
She and her attorney did not respond to a chance to comment last month when The Eagle reached out about her being charged.
In 2015, WPD highlighted Dickman’s work from the year before in a Facebook post, saying she “received a certificate of appreciation for her outstanding accuracy in financial document entry” after entering “14,064 items with a 99.7% accuracy rate. Good work Shauna!”
