Officer promoted after filing bias suit

Rhoads claims she was passed over originally because of race

An Arkansas State Police captain was promoted to major and head of a key division Thursday morning, one day after she filed a lawsuit against the state police director alleging he discriminated against her in backing a different candidate for the role.

Stacie Rhoads, 52, was promoted Thursday by the Arkansas State Police Commission from captain in a supervisor role in the Criminal Investigation Division to major and commander of the division and its six companies, according to a news release.

The decision came less than 24 hours after Rhoads and Tom Mars, an attorney and former Arkansas State Police director, filed a lawsuit against Col. Bill Bryant, the current director, stating that he and his command staff “engaged in a multi-faceted campaign to discredit and marginalize a white female State Police Captain with impeccable credentials and five times more experience than the other candidate.”

Rhoads is white, as is Bryant.

The lawsuit suggests that Bryant, with the backing of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, would want to promote a less-qualified candidate because they liked the political optics of promoting a Black woman to the distinguished position in the agency.

The other candidate, Capt. Paulette Ward, works in the agency’s Office of Professional Standards. The lawsuit states that Ward had about four years of experience working in the Criminal Investigations Division, compared with Rhoads’ roughly 21 years with the unit.

Rhoads, a Marine Corps veteran, was also entitled to preference in the promotion process because of a state law that gives preference in promotion to veterans or surviving spouses of veterans.

Ward is not a veteran or a surviving spouse and did not claim to be when she applied for the position, but the lawsuit alleges that a member of Bryant’s staff listed her as the spouse of a veteran to mislead the commission members.

The lawsuit states, however, that it does not mean to disparage Ward or suggest that promoting diversity in the agency is not an admirable goal.

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Hutchinson called several of the commissioners, who are appointed by the governor, to persuade them to back Ward, who was Bryant’s recommendation for the promotion.

Hutchinson is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Mars hadn’t spoken with Rhoads since her promotion, he wrote in a text message Thursday evening, but said that she would have to choose whether or not to pursue

claims on “back pay and attorneys’ fees.”

“All I can say is that Stacie should have been promoted five months ago, and that she went to great lengths to avoid filing a lawsuit,” Mars wrote.

Bryant received a copy of the lawsuit Wednesday afternoon and contacted the attorney general’s office, who is the designated attorney of record for the commission, Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler said.

Bryant does not intend to comment before he has met with his attorney, which he hadn’t yet done as of Thursday afternoon, Sadler said.

In addition to allegedly misrepresenting Ward’s veteran status to give her a leg up, the lawsuit says one of Bryant’s staff cast suspicion on Rhoads by opening a criminal investigation when a firearm went missing in the agency, even though the lawsuit says the gun was never missing at all and was located shortly after.

This allegedly culminated in a no-contact order with Rhoads within the Criminal Investigation Division where she worked.

Several of the allegations raised in the lawsuit concern what was said in the commission’s executive sessions, which are not included in the public record, Sadler said.

This means that many of the claims made in the lawsuit cannot be independently verified.

For example, the lawsuit states that Bryant more than once mentioned to the commissioners during one of these privileged executive sessions that Ward’s race was one of the reasons he recommended her for the promotion.

Before the lawsuit, on Feb. 10, Mars sent a letter to the commission members saying that Bryant and his staff were manipulating the promotion process in Rhoads’ case and hiding their efforts from the commission’s members. He called on Bryant to resign.

Bryant did not, and Hutchinson backed him, calling Mars’ letter an attempt at intimidation.

The lawsuit further alleges that Bryant has a history of racist and sexist treatment of personnel all the way down to new recruits, including anecdotes of him rejecting Hispanic and Latino recruits because he feared they were “plants” from cartels or Black recruits as “gang bangers.” In another example, the lawsuit alleges he didn’t think female recruits were tough enough to meet the agency’s requirements.