To Protect and to Serve II

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“I’D BEEN TO Little Rock several times for conferences and assessments,” said Lawrence Johnson, the city’s first Black police chief. “It seemed like a pretty progressive place, especially when it came to race. It didn’t take long to realize that what I saw was just a lot of window dressing.”

Johnson said he quickly learned that while the city officials who hired him may have been ready for change, the power structure that actually ran the city was a different story.

At the time he took over, Johnson said, the police chief position in Little Rock had mostly been reduced to a figurehead. “The FOP had immense power over policy and personnel decisions, and its leaders weren’t about to relinquish it,” he said. “On my first day — my very first day — Tommy Hudson, the president of the FOP, told me that if I just let my assistant chiefs make all the important decisions for me, we’d all get along just fine. I told him, ‘I’m sorry, but that isn’t why I was hired.’ It all just got more hostile from there.” (Hudson did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)
 
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Black officers who worked at LRPD at the time said there had long been criticism that the system by which the department determined promotions skipped over Black officers in favor of the FOP’s preferred candidates. “Human Resources used this mysterious formula to weigh the scores — one that always seemed to select for white officers,” said Gilbert. “We asked them over and over again to explain the formula. They told us we wouldn’t understand it.”

“Any time a Black officer did better than a white officer on the written portion, they’d end up ranked lower after the interview portion,” said Carlos Corbin, a retired assistant chief who was promoted by Johnson. “And the few times a Black officer finished ahead, the FOP would go to court to try to get the rankings revoked.”
 
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If the public campaign against Johnson seemed nasty, he and other Black officers from the era said the union also waged an informal campaign that was even more malicious. If a big conference was in town, they said the FOP would send officers in street clothes to the Little Rock airport to tell arriving passengers the city wasn’t safe under Johnson’s leadership.

According to several officers, the FOP leadership also started a rumor that Johnson was having an affair with a white woman, whom he allegedly kept in a hotel room on the west side of the city. Johnson said the rumor was nonsense, as did Earnest Whitten, who served as Johnson’s adjutant lieutenant at the time and is now at the Pulaski County sheriff’s office. “If he was having an affair, I would have known about it,” Whitten said. “But that’s how it works in the South, right? You want to bring a Black man down, you tell people he’s sleeping with white women.”

Johnson was hired in 2000 with a five-year contract. When the contract expired in 2005, both he and the city chose not to renew. “I promised my wife we’d give it five years and then reassess,” he said. “I’ll just say this: We were both ready to leave.”
 
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IN 2005, JOHNSON was replaced by Stuart Thomas, a longtime LRPD officer with strong backing from the FOP. According to Gilbert’s testimony in a deposition a few years ago, Thomas told a group of senior officers that he planned to reinstitute “the good ole boy system” and that he was “taking our police department back.” He immediately began rolling back Johnson’s reforms.

It was under Thomas that the department hired Josh Hastings, the officer who had attended a KKK meeting. Hastings accumulated a jaw-dropping disciplinary record before he was fired in 2012 after killing the Black teenager. Internal Affairs also determined he lied about the circumstances of the shooting. He was later tried twice on criminal charges, with both trials resulting in a hung jury

Black officers said the Thomas era reinvigorated the culture of impunity white officers had long enjoyed before Lawrence Johnson. In the discovery process for the lawsuit related to the teenager killed by Hastings, civil rights attorney Mike Laux, who has brought a number of cases against the LRPD and currently represents Humphrey, found numerous incidents in which white officers had used the N-word. A few admitted as much under oath, and at least two officers accused of using the word were permitted to retire with benefits rather than submit to an investigation.
 
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Black officers have a phrase for their Black colleagues who seem to take the FOP’s side. “Going along to get along,” said one Black sergeant still with the department, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. “You can be Black and get by if you steer clear of the FOP. You can do pretty well if you help them promote their people, keep quiet about any brutality or racism you see on the street, look the other way when white officers get promoted over more qualified Black officers, all of that. But once you start acting Black, they’ll turn on you on a dime.”

“Take a guy like Lt. Gilbert,” said J.C. White, a Black lieutenant. “He tried to warn this department about Starks. He tried to warn them about Hastings. He’s been right all along. He should be a chief somewhere. And what did they do? They blocked him in. They stopped his advancement.”
 
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Black officers said the way complaints are handled creates a sort of false balance between race-related incidents, in which efforts to correct entrenched discrimination are cast as reverse discrimination.

In 2016, for example, a white officer was investigated for posting racist content on Facebook. The officer responded by scouring the pages of Black officers for offensive language. He found a comment left on the page of J.C. White about President Barack Obama that said, “Every time they call him a Muslim replace that word with ****** that’s what they really mean.” White was disciplined for the comment, which had been left by someone else.

Another Black officer was disciplined in 2017 for another Facebook-related incident. He had filed a complaint with the BPOA about a white recruit who used the N-word on Facebook. In response, the white recruit then pointed out that the Black recruit who had reported the post to the department also used the word, though that use was more colloquial. The FOP defended the white recruit — but not the Black one. Both were fired.

Buckner, then the chief, also suspended White for reporting the first incident to the BPOA instead of going through his chain of command. “You go through the chain of command and nothing happens,” White said. “So you go outside of it, and they discipline you. First time in my career I’d been suspended.”

Black officers have also been subjected to complaints for merely noticing or objecting to racist comments within the department. Andre Dyer, then a lieutenant, once refused to take a trip with a group of white officers because some of them had previously made racist comments in front of him, which he had at the time tolerated without filing a complaint. A white officer then filed a complaint to the FOP about Dyer, claiming reverse discrimination for his declining to accompany them on the trip.
 
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But if I’d talk about racism or civil rights, the white males in the department would get offended and file reverse discrimination complaints against me.” The retired high-ranking Black officer was once investigated for reverse discrimination for describing an all-white division within the department as “lily white.” According to officers there at the time, it was indeed all white.

Despite the FOP’s history of supporting reverse discrimination complaints from white officers, several Black officers interviewed for this story laughed when asked about the FOP backing a discrimination complaint from a Black officer. They said they couldn’t think of a single instance.
 
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“When you had police chiefs in Little Rock who didn’t give a damn, officers got away with pretty much anything,” said Mike Laux, the civil rights attorney and Humphrey’s lawyer. “So, when you then get a chief who wants to hold bad officers accountable, the union can point to an incident where an officer of a different race or gender did something similar and got away with it. And they can say that to punish them for the same offense would be discriminatory. It becomes this race to the bottom for bad behavior.”

It’s against this backdrop of litigation that the lawsuits against Humphrey began to hit, one after another. Some of the allegations involve “he said, she said” disputes that can be difficult to fact-check. For those that can be verified — checked against internal records, witnesses, or interviews with the parties involved — most collapse under scrutiny.
 
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In a September 2019 email to the HR department, Humphrey addressed the matter. “I find it very concerning that everyone who files a harassment complaint against Lt. Plummer … is accused of being insubordinate,” he wrote. “Employees at LRPD, especially of color, feel that as though they are being disciplined for reporting bad behavior.” (I confirmed that at least two complainants against Plummer were themselves threatened with discipline for insubordination.)

Three days later, Plummer showed up at Humphrey’s office with an FOP representative. She said a source told her Humphrey was unhappy with her performance. “I hadn’t told anyone else about that email,” Humphrey said. “Which means someone in HR improperly leaked its contents to Lt. Plummer.” After the encounter, Humphrey asked HR if someone had told Plummer about the email.
 
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GreyWolf1129 said:
I'm here to correct you, sort of...

In Georgia, an arrest warrant also serves as a search warrant for the address listed on the arrest warrant. So, if we have a warrant for John Jones at 123 Any Street, and we go to 123 Any Street to arrest him, then the arrest warrant gives us authority to enter the residence to search for him.

But if we go to his Mom's house next door at 125 Any Street, we have no right for non-consensual entry and search. Note that there are exceptions. If we know him by sight, and saw him run into Mom's house, then yes, we can enter. But I prefer to set a perimeter and get a search warrant for Mom's house. That's just me. At that point I'm probably going to use the guys in tactical pajamas, so it's best to check all the boxes in case it goes bad.

Again, this is Georgia. It's likely that other states have different rules.
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Thank you for clarifying that for me.
So do they write most warrants for person and address? We had a sheriff show up at our door with a warrant for a person at 400____ ____ blvd. That is a non existent address. I felt bad he had wasted his time. Our block begins at 402, apparently someone was being slick.
How do you verify valid addresses?
 
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Each agency, I'm sure, has it's own policies and procedures for warrant validation, application, and execution. I can only speak to that of which I know. So there's my disclaimer.

Each arrest warrant includes an address for the suspect, if known. If not, then we leave it blank. Sometimes we use the L/K/A, Last Known Address. The address can be obtained from a number of sources, and I'm not going to get into details here for obvious reasons. But we (my agency) make every effort to get the actual address where we believe the suspect is residing at, at the time of the warrant application.

So yes, we make every effort to confirm, and then validate the address. Believe it or not, Google Earth is a great source for making sure the address actually exists, as well as county tax records. We routinely receive civil process and warrants from other agencies where we look up the address on their paperwork...and it doesn't exist. We simply mail it back with the standard "Address Does Not Exist" stamp, and leave it to them to correct their mistake. If it's a felony warrant, we might contact the originating agency to see if we can help them figure out the correct address, but they still have to amend and forward the corrected warrant.

"Wrong address" warrant service can...and has...resulted in tragedy. We make every effort to make sure that the door we knock on, or down, is the right one. As a result, it's been a long time here since we went through the wrong door. The Devil hides in the details. Get 'em right, and there's less chance you end up on the 6 o'clock news trying to explain your f*** up.

Hope this helps.
 
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GreyWolf1129 said:
Each agency, I'm sure, has it's own policies and procedures for warrant validation, application, and execution. I can only speak to that of which I know. So there's my disclaimer.

Each arrest warrant includes an address for the suspect, if known. If not, then we leave it blank. Sometimes we use the L/K/A, Last Known Address. The address can be obtained from a number of sources, and I'm not going to get into details here for obvious reasons. But we (my agency) make every effort to get the actual address where we believe the suspect is residing at, at the time of the warrant application.

So yes, we make every effort to confirm, and then validate the address. Believe it or not, Google Earth is a great source for making sure the address actually exists, as well as county tax records. We routinely receive civil process and warrants from other agencies where we look up the address on their paperwork...and it doesn't exist. We simply mail it back with the standard "Address Does Not Exist" stamp, and leave it to them to correct their mistake. If it's a felony warrant, we might contact the originating agency to see if we can help them figure out the correct address, but they still have to amend and forward the corrected warrant.

"Wrong address" warrant service can...and has...resulted in tragedy. We make every effort to make sure that the door we knock on, or down, is the right one. As a result, it's been a long time here since we went through the wrong door. The Devil hides in the details. Get 'em right, and there's less chance you end up on the 6 o'clock news trying to explain your f*** up.

Hope this helps.
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Yes. It filled in the blanks for me. Ty.
FWIW thank you for your time on the job. Be safe in your new role. I believe good cops make up the majority of police forces. I feel like Georgia is losing a fair officer.
 
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Rickyvol77 said:
You don’t want to know what EMS, Firefighters, RNs, and doctors do then
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And if that sort of thing gives any of them a thrill, that's what the FBI would call a "clue". Morbid curiosity is one thing. That crap is on a whole 'nother level, IMO.

And no, I never kept any photos I took. Took me long enough to get some of them out of my mind as it was. No need to prolong the process with photos on my phone. Any photos I took were to preserve the scene as I found it, and once they were transmitted to the Investigators phone or email account, I deleted them right then and there. Even the "funny" ones. It's one thing to do your job. And it's a different thing entirely to rob someone of what may have been the last shred of dignity they had. In life, or in death. Matters not. Wrong is wrong. Even if you have the "right" to do it.

Integrity is what you do when no one else is watching you. Lord knows, I've made my share of mistakes over the years, but almost all of them were honest, and stupid ones. Believe it or not, I'm kinda proud of that.

Go Vols.
 
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