Police chief files discrimination lawsuit

LITTLE ROCK — Police Chief Keith Humphrey on Wednesday broke his silence on the internal strife within his department with a countersuit accusing several col- leagues and the Fraternal Order of Police, among others, of conspiring in an attempt to force him out.

Humphrey and his attorney, Michael Laux, claim members of the executive board of the Fraternal Order of Police, a local police union that represents many Little Rock officers, sought to drive Humphrey out of office because of his insistence on departmental reforms.

During a 90-minute news conference at the Mosaic Church in Little Rock, a visibly emotional Humphrey appealed to the rank-and-file within his department and within the Fraternal Order of Police. He said his goal will be to bring the department together in spite of the allegations.

“I want to make it very clear to the men and the women of the Little Rock

Police Department: I love you guys. I love y’all,” Humphrey said. “I’m not mad at anybody. I’m disappointed that as a police chief, I have to take these action[s]. This is unheard of. But at the same time, these men and women need to know that their leader will stand up for what’s right.”

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas represents Humphrey’s counterpunch in a legal battle which so far this year has pitted the chief against two of his three assistant chiefs, as well as several other officers within his own department.

The litigation stems from the fallout surrounding a fatal shooting of a Black man, Bradley Blackshire, by a white officer last year. The lawsuits targeting the chief allege he retaliated against his staff and their departmental allies because police officials testified to a city commission an internal investigation into the shooting was rushed.

Named in the lawsuit are 21 individuals, including two assistant chiefs, Hayward Finks and Alice Fulk; former officer Charles Starks, who shot Blackshire in February 2019, which led to Starks’ firing and reinstatement by a judge; a series of executive board members of the police union; Russ Racop, a local blogger critical of the police; and Shella Atlas Evans, a city human resources official.

Also named in the suit are the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police and WatchGuard Video, the police’s provider of body cameras owned by Motorola Solutions, Inc.

Humphrey claims Racop, the Fraternal Order of Police and Starks defamed him. He claims the Fraternal Order of Police violated his civil rights by campaigning to remove him.

He claims five of his deputies — Finks, Fulk, Christina Plummer, Duane Finks (Hayward Finks’ brother) and Reginald Parks, all of whom have previously sued Humphrey — abused the legal process with baseless allegations meant to force him out.

All of the defendants, Humphrey claims, engaged in a civil rights conspiracy to intimidate him into quitting his job.

At one point in the complaint, Humphrey says Finks and Fulk, the two assistant chiefs who have sued him, intentionally sabotaged the department’s response to the George Floyd protests over the summer “to create yet more ammunition to use in the abusive lawsuits” they filed with others.

Two of the individuals Humphrey names in the lawsuit have announced their departures from the department this month.

Fulk’s last day as assistant chief is today. She will join the Arkansas State Capitol Police on Friday for a month of transition alongside current chief Darrell Hedden before taking over his role at the end of October.

Starks announced his resignation from the department earlier this month, telling Humphrey in the letter the chief had done everything possible to make his working conditions “intolerable.”

The inclusion of WatchGuard as a defendant appears to be based on an allegation, contained in the complaint, that Matt Murski, an employee of the body-camera company, assisted Plummer with accessing video footage of Humphrey at a woman’s house to provide Racop with the footage in order to damage the chief by suggesting Humphrey was engaged in an affair.

During the news conference, Humphrey said the claim of an extramarital affair was false. He was at the woman’s house to drop off a paper with a report number on it pertaining to an incident where her vehicle was stolen after giving her a ride home the previous day, he said.

When he dropped off the paper at her house the next morning, he encountered another officer who was at the residence next door because of a death investigation, Humphrey said, and spoke with the officer to ask how everything was going.

Humphrey suggested he was blackmailed because of the video from that encounter.

“Basically, I was told, in so many words, if I don’t get out of town that video was going to be made public,” Humphrey said. Later, when asked who told him that, Humphrey declined to say.

Addressing the claims of retaliation that have dogged him through the litigation, Humphrey attributed them to moments when he exercised his authority as a manager, contravened the Fraternal Order of Police with regard to policy or did other inconsequential things such as slamming a door.

“How is it retaliation when you don’t want somebody walking through your office while you’re on the phone, or you have someone in your office, and you tell them, ‘You can’t cut through my office,” Humphrey asked.

“I did shut a door hard. I did,” he said moments later. “That’s my right.”

Chris Burks, an attorney representing five police officials named in Humphrey’s lawsuit, denied allegations Wednesday leveled at his clients in the complaint.

“The lawsuits are about him transferring people’s jobs at the Police Department and denying them pay and training because they testified against him,” Burks said.

He argued with his lawsuit Wednesday, Humphrey “wants to nationalize this and make this about police reform. And you know, the reason he’s trying to do that is because … he knows that that’s popular.”

Humphrey was named police chief by newly elected Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. in March 2019 after serving as chief in Norman, Okla., beating out Finks and Fulk, who were finalists for the position. Asked if he had spoken with Scott prior to filing the lawsuit, Humphrey said he hadn’t.

“The city’s not involved in it; I didn’t talk to the mayor,” he said. “No parts of the city was involved in this or in this discussion. This was a decision that I made. Who I talked to was God and my family.”

Laux told reporters Wednesday that Humphrey was “not a vindictive man,” describing him as a “healing chief.” The police chief, Laux suggested, was appointed by a new mayor who had been handed a popular mandate from voters to reform police practices in the city.

Laux said Humphrey’s opponents “create false stories, peddle it to the media … and then they use the media story as an exhibit in their motion, which then becomes another story, and it just goes like that.”

The Little Rock Black Police Officers Association has backed Humphrey, while the Fraternal Order of Police has been critical. Of the Fraternal Order of Police’s members, more than 83% voted in favor of a no-confidence resolution on Humphrey, the union announced June 2.

Humphrey, who is Black, emphasized the lawsuit “is not about race.”

Additionally, he said the lawsuit is not about the hundreds of Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police members who may have joined the union simply for the group’s legal protection and bargaining. He assured reporters many Fraternal Order of Police members do not agree with the union’s tactics.