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RALEIGH (AP) — Three years ago, authorities went to the town of Spring Lake to check into claims local police weren't doing enough to investigate the beating death of a little girl.

A year later, the county district attorney started asking questions about drug investigations and started a criminal probe of the department. Then, authorities say about $3,000 disappeared from evidence last year after police raided a motel room where they'd claimed to smell marijuana smoke.

Now, the 20-member police department in the community about 60 miles south of Raleigh has been neutered after the district attorney said he wouldn't prosecute most of its cases. Two officers are in jail on charges revealed in indictments made public Tuesday. And officials are painting the picture of a department that cared little for some of its citizens.

"If you can't trust law enforcement you've got a real problem," Cumberland County Sheriff Earl "Moose" Butler said Tuesday.

A day earlier, as district attorney Ed Grannis announced he won't prosecute most cases sent to him from the department, police Sgt. Darryl Eugene Coulter Sr. was charged with 20 counts, including three each of second-degree kidnapping, simple assault and assault with a deadly weapon.

Sgt. Alphonzo Devonne Whittington Jr. was charged with 11 counts, including three counts of felony larceny and one count of felony embezzlement.

The officers remained in jail Tuesday, Coulter under $250,000 bond and Whittington under $100,000 bond. It wasn't clear whether they'd retained lawyers, though the sheriff said he didn't believe they had. Calls to their police chief were not immediately returned.

The indictments say Coulter took $2,900 from a man in a motel room and told a junior officer to write in a report that he was drawn by the smell of marijuana. Whittington, in charge of the police evidence room, was charged with embezzling the money.

An apparently unrelated set of charges against Coulter involve allegations he broke into a house, roughed up three men there and handcuffed them before leaving.

Grannis on Monday released a letter he'd written to the county's chief judges, saying he will not prosecute "the majority of criminal cases" from the department. He said he plans to dismiss current misdemeanors from Spring Lake and is reviewing its felony charges.

The letter references a still-sealed state report on the department, saying it shows "a willingness by senior officers of the Spring Lake Police Department to intentionally violate the criminal laws of this state. We see a willingness to lie and direct junior officers to fabricate the facts in basic police reports."

In the letter, Grannis said the March 2006 death of 3-year-old Anijah Burr was pivotal in bringing increased scrutiny to the department.

"It was clear that the department had not handled the homicide investigation in a professional manner," Grannis wrote.

He didn't offer other details. But Butler said Tuesday that sheriffs arrested a suspect, who is still in custody. He said the local police did not seem to want to investigate.

"We just had to start from scratch when we got it," he said. "Not to take the initiative to investigate a child's death is inexecusable."