Even when unhealthy cops face penalties, police union guidelines typically insulate them from punishment—even for “vile and disgusting” conduct.
In 2016, officers with the San Antonio Police Division cleared a homeless encampment from a non-public parking zone. Matthew Luckhurst, a motorbike patrol officer concerned within the effort, was making an attempt to get the residents to scrub up on their means out when he allegedly provided a homeless man a shit sandwich—actually, canine feces on bread.
Luckhurst would later attest that he had picked up the feces with a discarded piece of bread so he would not step on it, then put it in a meals container which he assumed the person would throw away. However David Ramos, a fellow officer who was current, testified that Luckhurst had laughed about it on the scene earlier than later telling different officers that he “had made a sandwich and force-fed somebody.” Ramos stated that was false however claimed that “Luckhurst had unfold the rumors as a result of he was a prankster.”
Luckhurst was fired in October 2016, with San Antonio arguing that he had created a legal responsibility for town if the person had eaten the sandwich and change into sick. The chief of police referred to as it “a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding ideas of ‘treating all with integrity, compassion, equity and respect.'” However in line with native authorities code, officers should be disciplined inside 180 days of the incident in query. There was some confusion over the precise incident date, partly as a result of Luckhurst’s physique digital camera was not turned on. Arbitrators decided in March 2019 that the division acted too late and ordered Luckhurst reinstated.
By that point, Luckhurst had dedicated one other shitty prank: A feminine San Antonio officer complained concerning the cleanliness of the ladies’s restroom amenities on the police station. In response, Luckhurst and one other officer in June 2016 defecated in a bathroom within the ladies’s lavatory and unfold a brown substance on the seat. Luckhurst bragged about it to different officers. The division positioned him on one other indefinite suspension, and in June 2020, 4 full years after the incident, an arbitrator affirmed the termination.
However earlier this month, the San Antonio Categorical-Information reported that simply 5 months after his closing firing, Luckhurst was employed as a reserve officer by the police division in Floresville, Texas, 30 miles away. This week, after being inundated with emails, Floresville Mayor Cissy Gonzalez-Dippel introduced that on December 13, “Matthew Luckhurst was launched from employment,” and town can be “implementing stricter hiring insurance policies for all metropolis of Floresville staff.”
After Luckhurst’s second termination was upheld, San Antonio Metropolis Supervisor Erik Walsh stated, “This particular person clearly has no enterprise sporting an SAPD uniform, and it ought to by no means have been this difficult to fireplace him.” This can be a widespread drawback amongst police departments: In Washington, D.C., for instance, town’s police division reinstated at the very least 37 fired officers over six years, at a value to town of greater than $14 million in again pay. Almost half of the officers had been terminated for conduct deemed a “risk to security.”
However Luckhurst’s case supplies an additional instance of how it’s exhausting for a fired officer to remain fired. When Floresville employed Luckhurst, a cursory Google search would have revealed his historical past. Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, has been employed as an officer twice lately, every time resigning when it was publicly reported. Loehmann was fired not for capturing an unarmed baby however for concealing {that a} police division the place he’d been beforehand employed had deemed him “unfit for responsibility.”
Identical to with Luckhurst, Loehmann’s historical past posed no drawback in securing additional employment as a police officer, and he solely left when public outcry demanded it.
