* From about 13 months ago…

A veteran police officer in Illinois resigned Tuesday after researchers connected him to a deluge of violent and bigoted social media posts that glorified Adolf Hitler and hate crimes.

The resignation of Springfield Police Department Officer Aaron Paul Nichols, 46, came shortly after his department announced an investigation into the posts, first surfaced by Anonymous Comrades Collective (ACC), a group of anti-fascist researchers.

“If I found a genie and I had one wish? The Jews would be a distant memory in 72 hours,” one of the posts allegedly written by Nichols reads.

The Springfield Police Department said on Friday that it had launched an investigation into Nichols’ “racist comments,” and that his “police powers had been removed.” On Tuesday, the department told HuffPost in a statement that Nichols, who joined the department in 2004, resigned instead of meeting with investigators.

* Washington Post reporter Hannah Allam followed up…

After the meeting, [Springfield Police Chief Ken Scarlette] said it was frustrating that he could not yet deliver an ending for the saga. His biggest play was decertification, a formal request for the revocation of Nichols’s ability to work elsewhere as a law enforcement officer, an option that had not been available in Illinois until the governor introduced it as part of recent criminal justice reforms.

The process was so new, Scarlette said, that when he sent the request — just four days after learning of Nichols’s online posts — his contact at the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, known as ILETSB, told him there were no personnel to consider the issue and likened the office to “flying a plane in the air that has not been put together.”

Twelve months later, ILETSB still had not officially ruled on the matter. Officials there did not respond to a phone message or email seeking comment.

The move might not be monumental, Scarlette said, but it would be an answer to the question that still comes up in every meeting, one concrete win in his year-long fight against hate.

“You don’t get to just resign and this whole thing goes away,” he said. “Because it’s not going away for me as chief. It’s not going away for this agency. It’s not going away for the city.”

The whole thing is worth a read, but the WaPo reporter wasn’t able to reach the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board for whatever reason [Adding: An ILETSB official says the board never received a call or message from anyone at the Washington Post].

I contacted the ILETSB today and was told that because the resignation happened before July 1 of last year, when the decertification statute took effect, the board had no legal means of proceeding with a discretionary decertification.

But, I was told, former officer Nichols is now in a state database, so if he applies for another police job in Illinois, he’ll be flagged as having a misconduct violation when another police agency contacts the ILETSB as required. Also, it will now be essentially impossible for Nichols to be recertified by the ILETSB.