Editor's note:
This is the first of a two-part series that documents how former Akron Police Lieutenant Mark Farrar profited as a broker between businesses seeking private security and the Akron Police officers seeking to earn extra money off the clock, often by charging rates above those allowed by the APD.
As the Akron Police Department’s go-to outside job broker, veteran Akron Police Lieutenant Mark Farrar wielded significant influence over the businesses seeking extra paid police protection and the officers seeking to earn extra money off the clock.
Records obtained by Signal Akron detail that Farrar used that influence over much of the last decade to operate a complex financial enterprise that gamed the secondary employment system and used APD resources to amass wealth. This was on top of the six-figure salary he received helping to oversee the department’s information technology systems.
The documents show that In his informal but profitable role as an outside job coordinator, he unilaterally required many businesses to pay higher than the department-regulated pay rates so officers would be more inclined to take those external jobs ahead of extra APD shifts.
Part two: Lt. Mark Farrar developed a reputation from 2017 to 2025 as the guy who could book outside work gigs for Akron Police officers and security shifts for area businesses. But a criminal investigation found that Farrar had a habit of working outside jobs on APD time and that he had been charging three businesses higher hourly rates and scheduling fees than he was allowed to by the APD. Read it here.
Farrar then profited from the cut he took as the middle man, raking in fees in many instances higher than he was allowed to take for every hour an officer worked on an outside job he coordinated.
The lieutenant methodically garnered significant personal wealth outside of what was recorded on his city paystubs, and his November retirement triggered payouts that made him the highest paid City of Akron employee in 2025, by far, in on-the-books compensation alone.
Signal Akron examined thousands of pages of records, communicated with sources with firsthand knowledge, and reviewed internal affairs interview transcripts and other internal documents that detailed how Farrar operated what was essentially an alternative overtime network on behalf of outside businesses, openly circumventing APD rules for years.
Why we wrote this two-part series:
Akron’s police department is funded with local tax dollars — public entities owe it to the community to make sure public resources are used wisely.
Set rates for outside police employment consisting of a cap and a floor at the same rate, are essential safeguards against corruption.
A law enforcement agency’s trust depends on an equal administration of justice for those with power and those without it. If those with money and power — such as Farrar — can walk away from a grand scheme with a minor misdemeanor and a small restitution check while those without power are prosecuted to the fullest extent possible — such as two city maintenance workers Signal Akron Government Reporter Doug Brown highlighted in the series — it calls into question the fairness of the system.
Akron’s police officers sign an oath to protect and serve. That includes protecting the force’s public reputation, which includes business owners who may not have been able to afford higher fees.
“He said we have an obligation to staff the secondary employment at businesses who make the request,” Deputy Chief David Laughlin wrote of Farrar in what the APD called a confidential report in 2023. “I informed him our priority is to staff the police department and we have shifts in patrol that go unfilled.”
Records show the lieutenant thrived financially within a department that provided little oversight and little record-keeping of the secondary employment system, and few repercussions when its policies were violated.
Records obtained by Signal Akron detail that:
- While the APD has a set hourly rate officers are allowed to charge for off-duty work in uniform — no more, no less without permission from the chief — there is no mechanism for the department to track how much businesses actually pay officers. Billing is handled outside of department oversight, and violations of that rate were rampant.
- Officers working at bars and nightclubs were often paid at the end of their late night shifts in cash, according to a source connected to the department and a bar owner who made the payments.
- For years, approval forms for longer-term outside employers were tracked on a single piece of looseleaf paper filed annually, and some were not tracked at all. Shorter-term or sporadic employers were, by default, not tracked.
Farrar also worked many of the outside jobs himself, frequently at the same time he was on duty or on another job and frequently while using APD cruisers without having the businesses pay the department-required hourly fees for that service.
Farrar declined to comment on this story based on the advice of his attorney. The mayor’s office declined to answer most of Signal Akron’s questions or to make the key city employees connected to this story available for interviews, and it chastised Signal Akron for sending an email to an APD detective and the city’s Chief of Safety Craig Morgan, who oversaw the city’s prosecutorial decisions in Farrar’s case.
Creating a sense of ‘disrepute’ between APD and businesses
Investigators in the Office of Professional Standards and Accountability wrote in 2024 that Farrar’s longstanding practices were an “ethical failure” and blatantly violated department rules, causing “a sense of disrepute between businesses and the Akron Police Department.”
But he went right back to it after a weeklong suspension — a detective found he charged even higher fees than before his suspension.
Farrar retired a year and a half after the 2024 probe, the same day a criminal investigation began, cashing in on significant financial benefits he wouldn’t be eligible to receive if he had been fired at any point.
A lieutenant in the detective bureau said in 2025 that Farrar’s practices were criminal — even just the small scope he investigated — documenting illicit billing practices far above the threshold for a felony theft in office charge.
But City of Akron prosecutors offered a plea deal in April for a minor misdemeanor and a $12,421 restitution check from Farrar for repeatedly using a police vehicle without authorization last year.
During the criminal investigation, a detective asked representatives of three businesses Farrar overcharged if they wanted to pursue charges. “I made it clear that this overcharging was illegal,” he said of an interview with a House Three Thirty manager — but none of them wanted to, his report says. The vast majority of businesses that paid more than they should have were never contacted.
In the months before Farrar’s minor misdemeanor charge, City of Akron authorities pursued harsher felony indictments for two lesser-paid city water maintenance workers who were accused of taking less than the lieutenant. The police report in that case accused the pair of scrapping old water meters they had replaced instead of returning the metal to the city, pocketing less than 10 percent of the amount of money that the city accused Farrar of taking when he used his APD cruiser without permission on outside jobs..
The maintenance workers were indicted last July and convicted in the Summit County Court of Common Pleas in March. Court records show one of the former maintenance workers had to pay $4,702 and the other paid $1,242 — both now have felonies on their records and are in the middle of six-month probation sentences.
Farrar’s defense attorney, Don Malarcik, told Signal Akron that, if prosecutors had referred the case for felony prosecution, he told them he would take it to trial and would subpoena extensive city records that he said would show Farrar’s cruiser scheme was widespread inside the APD. A vast acceptance of the practice inside the APD is a defense of a criminal theft charge, he said: “You have to know what you’re doing is wrong and intend to deprive others of property. You can’t commit theft without knowing it’s a crime.”
“Was the city out money? Arguably,” Malarcik said. “And then the question became, ‘How pervasive is this?’”
Farrar grows personal real estate holdings
As the lieutenant’s outside job network grew, state and county records show Farrar spent more than $3 million buying more than 30 buildings and then renovating the rental units and managing his burgeoning empire using APD resources and time.
One of those buildings, a West Hill triplex, was sold to his company off market for $125,000 last summer by Deputy Chief David Laughlin, according to county property records. In the two years prior to that real estate transaction, internal emails and investigation records show Laughlin had repeatedly chastised Farrar for his secondary employment practices and oversaw policy investigations. (Laughlin’s signature on the deed transferring the property to Farrar’s company matches the signature in directives he issued as an interim police chief. Laughlin did not respond to a request for comment).
Farrar frequently used his fourth-floor office in the APD’s downtown headquarters as his personal business hub when taking his tenants to court, according to eviction records and other lawsuits he filed. When he sued a Section 8 tenant living in one of his new buildings for unpaid bills, his APD office was listed as his business address in court files and he dictated the tenant deliver $500 in back rent “to the Akron Police Department” to “personally give” him the money.
On his company’s Facebook page, he posted pictures of his extensive renovations and advertised his properties, pitching his personal dedication to the operation to potential tenants. “I run and manage my own properties so you are dealing directly with the owner,” he wrote on multiple posts among the many advertising his company in 2023, a period his personnel file shows he never called off of work with the APD.
The Facebook account for Farrar’s business — Akron City Rentals LLC — was deactivated shortly after Signal Akron emailed Farrar seeking comment on this story.
Gravitating toward cash jobs
Farrar billed companies that hired officers at least $50 per hour instead of the contractually set $40 rate in place for most businesses at the time (outside jobs with traffic duty or at bars could be charged at the $50 rate). The higher rate acted as an inducement for officers who hadn’t been taking the outside work because more businesses had been asking them to fill out tax forms.
“Nobody’s gonna work one job for four hours with a 1099 [tax] form for $40 an hour,” Farrar explained in a 2024 internal affairs investigation probing allegations of his widespread abuse of the department’s secondary employment regulations – Form 1099 is for independent contractors to report taxes. He paired the higher hourly rate with an increased hourly cut for himself, because “This is big business, all right? … Businesses are paying for it, and it takes time and energy to schedule extra jobs, and nobody thinks that should be free,” he said.
“I mean you don’t understand until you schedule how much of a pain in the rear end it is. And I know what fills jobs and what doesn’t.”
Cash jobs, which didn’t come with a 1099 form from the employer, had been easier to fill, according to interview transcripts. Farrar gravitated to cash jobs when he began his outside work around 2017, in the aftermath of a scandal inside a unit tasked with investigating domestic violence among officers. Then in the midst of a divorce, he worked those jobs “because I had to” and it allowed him to pick his own schedule.
Incident reports, a 2018 internal investigation, and sources detail that he began working and scheduling late night, under-the-table cash jobs at dive bars and nightclubs. A captain, who had responded as a supervisor investigating several use-of-force incidents at those bars with Farrar on the payroll, issued a stark warning to APD leaders in late 2018, according to records obtained by Signal Akron.
The captain warned of Farrar’s connection to a bar that federal search warrant affidavits show had been under surveillance in a drug trafficking case against its owner (who was indicted in federal court, convicted, and is still in prison), and that after a 2018 shooting inside a Firestone Park bar where Farrar often worked, the captain reported Farrar appeared to have provided the owner with information during the open investigation.
The captain called for an investigation of Farrar’s “proclivity for cash jobs” on the payroll of “a number of individuals running questionable establishments” who contact him “directly about scheduling and providing officers.”
Days after the warning, and days before an investigation began, Farrar sent an email to a department supervisor that “effective immediately, I am not going to be the secondary employment coordinator” for the bars and clubs mentioned by name in the captain’s warning. “I just wanted to give you a heads up as an FYI. MF.”
But Farrar continued to work the outside gigs himself and continued to coordinate many others for other officers.
The investigation, which only looked into one night club mentioned, confirmed the night club owner paid Farrar and the officers he coordinated “by handing them a sealed envelope” with cash at the end of the night. It also concluded that Farrar was likely paid at a higher rate than the rules allowed but that they couldn’t prove that Farrar solicited or “knowingly condoned” the payments. He was not disciplined.
One officer said he never counted the cash he was handed, so he couldn’t tell investigators how much he got paid. OPSA called that “problematic” because “officers have a duty to verify cash wages paid to them from secondary employers, as soon as practical to insure accuracy and compliance with department policies.
“OPSA is of the belief that the increased rate of pay has been a common practice for several months but we have not conclusively determined when Lt. Farrar became aware of this,” the investigation concluded.
Farrar called the investigation a “witch hunt,” records show.
Continue reading part two here.
