USA TODAY International Edition
The consequences of speaking truth
How law enforcement punishes its whistleblowers
WARNING: This investigation includes offensive language related to police misconduct.
To many in law enforcement, snitching against another cop is a betrayal that can’t go unpunished.
Those who enforce this code – the blue wall of silence – have stuffed dead rats and feces into fellow officers’ lockers. They’ve issued death threats, ignored requests for backup, threatened family members and planted drugs on the officers who reported misconduct.
Department leaders often condone these reprisals or pile on by launching internal investigations to discredit
Behind the Blue Wall: About this project
After George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, USA TODAY set out to examine why so many officers seem to look the other way when witness to egregious misconduct. Reporters spent more than a year identifying officers who had blown the whistle in departments across the nation. They traced what happened to the men and women who crossed the blue wall of silence. In coming weeks, stories will examine laws and court decisions that allow the problem to continue, case studies and possible solutions. those who expose wrongdoing. Whistleblowers have been fired, jailed and in a least one case, forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The pattern of behavior is both destructive and widespread throughout policing, a USA TODAY investigation found. Departments across the country have adopted an unofficial system of retaliation that allows misconduct to persist and helps police leaders avoid accountability. And while communities of color and other marginalized groups bear the brunt of police brutality, the profession is blind to race, gender and seniority when it comes to punishing officers who try to expose these practices.
USA TODAY set out to establish, for the first time, the extent of law enforcement’s blue wall of silence and its impact on the individual officers who have defied it. In building a catalog of more than 300 examples from the past decade, reporters found there is no wrongdoing so egregious or clear cut that a whistleblower can feel safe in bringing it to light.
In South Carolina, an officer leaked the fact that fellow deputies beat a prisoner who later died in custody. In Florida, a detective reported a captain who had impregnated a 16- year- old girl and then paid for the abortion. In Oregon, a sergeant complained that a co- worker bragged about killing an unarmed teenager.
After speaking out, all of them were forced out of their departments and were branded traitors by their fellow officers.
“Whistleblowing is a life sentence,” said Shannon Spalding, a former undercover narcotics officer detective in Chicago who exposed a corruption scheme that has led to dozens of overturned convictions. “I’m an officer without a department. I lost my house, I lost my marriage. It affects you in ways you would never imagine.”
Meanwhile, many of the cops accused of misconduct kept their jobs or faced only minor punishments, USA TODAY found. And officers who lied or stayed silent in support of an accused colleague later secured promotions, overtime and admiration from their peers.
USA TODAY spent a year examining thousands of documents from police and sheriff ’ s departments, prosecutors, oversight groups and regulators around the country, including previously confidential federal labor records. In addition, reporters reviewed a decade of media reports and court cases. Then they traveled to seven states to interview officers and victims of police misconduct.
The result is the most comprehensive public accounting of police retaliation ever compiled, including dozens of examples never before reported. Among the findings:
Cases of retaliation appeared in every type of department: majority Black forces and majority white forces, union shops and at- will shops, two- man outposts and massive urban police departments, and, perhaps most notably, places that have adopted strict accountability measures.
Officers who report wrongdoing are often forced to navigate procedures that derail their efforts. Sometimes they must report up the chain of command to the very people they want investigated. Federal, state, and local agencies can take years to intervene or decline to investigate altogether. When agencies do take action, they often direct complaints back to the police department, compromising officers who were promised anonymity.
Police leaders weaponize internal affairs, pursuing minor rule infractions such as breaking the chain of command, in order to discredit whistleblowers and get rid of them.
Police unions play a critical role in enforcing the blue wall of silence. They often back cops accused of misconduct during court and disciplinary hearings but not those who turn them in. Unions have also lobbied for rules that make things harder for officers who want to come forward and easier for departments to hide misconduct.
Police chiefs and sheriffs who retaliate against whistleblowers rarely face serious consequences.
Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, said cover- ups have historically been framed as part of “police culture,” instead of a phenomenon with actual mechanisms that can be addressed and changed.
“Cultural norms can’t be litigated,” Hansford said, “but retaliatory policies can.”
For those who choose to expose wrongdoing among their peers, the personal consequences can be devastating.
Moses Black’s life unraveled just before midnight on Good Friday, 2015.
Black, then a veteran officer at the Gonzales Police Department in Louisiana, saw a sergeant twice kick a handcuffed man who had just been pepper sprayed. “Get the f--- up!” the sergeant barked, according to Black. The man, who had epilepsy, hit his head on the concrete floor and began to convulse. He later recovered at the hospital.
Two other officers witnessed the incident but didn’t report it. Black did.
An internal investigation cleared the sergeant of wrongdoing. Citing the other two witnesses, Police Chief Sherman Jackson wrote in a memo that the sergeant’s use of force was not excessive because it “wasn’t like a football kick but a gradual kick.”
Soon after, Black received a 90- day unpaid suspension – which was later overturned by the city’s oversight board – for being late to a shift and cursing about his supervisor. The chief later fired him for questioning a neighbor about a seat- belt ticket she had received from another officer. After an appeal hearing, the board upheld it.
“He investigated his fellow officer without any approval from superiors,” Jackson testified at the hearing. The chief also maintained that the discipline was warranted and unrelated to the Banks incident.
Jackson declined multiple interview requests from USA TODAY but said in an email statement that proper procedures were followed.
Black also filed a retaliation lawsuit against the department, but a judge threw it out.
Black, a towering man with broad shoulders betrayed by a slouch, told USA TODAY he spent his life savings on legal bills in a fruitless effort to fight the case.
He applied for jobs at law enforcement agencies all over the state but wasn’t hired. Records show the Gonzales Police Department did not tell them about Black’s years of positive evaluations from supervisors. So now he fixes air conditioning units in sweltering attics for $ 19 an hour. It gets so hot – up to 150 degrees in the summer – he changes his shirt twice a day.
“I’m miserable,” he said in an interview. “Since all this happened, my life has just been s---.”
‘ Unwritten law’ among police
For nearly a century, police leaders, federal civil rights officials responsible for accountability, and other experts have identified a systemic culture of silence within law enforcement as a key reason police misconduct is pervasive yet so easily concealed.
Evidence of the problem was documented as far back as 1929, when President Herbert Hoover commissioned a group of experts to figure out why police were failing so miserably to rein in crime during Prohibition.
One of those commissioners, August Vollmer, now considered the father of modern policing, concluded that local police departments valued loyalty over accountability. “It’s unwritten law in police departments that police officers must never testify against their brother officers,” he wrote.
In the late 1960s, a patrolman named Frank Serpico, later immortalized on film by Al Pacino, exposed widespread bribery and kickbacks throughout the New York Police Department. Serpico was branded a rat and was later shot in the face during a drug raid, an incident that many believe was orchestrated by his fellow cops.
Similar situations have played out in cities across the country up until the present day.
Earlier this year, some commentators and pundits declared that the blue wall was crumbling after Derek Chauvin’s fellow Minneapolis police officers testified against him. However, USA TODAY’s examination of cases found the circumstances in which Chauvin killed George Floyd – an incident that occurred in broad daylight with multiple civilian witness and several video angles – to be unique. Far more often, one officer who speaks out against another does so with only the victim of misconduct as a supporting witness.
Hansford, the law professor, said the Minneapolis officers had no choice but to sacrifice one of their own in an attempt to avoid protests that could lead to systemic reform.
“They’re throwing him under the bus to keep the bus running,” Hansford said of Chauvin. “That’s a situation where they’re always going to act through the lens of self- interest.”
Nowhere to turn
Out of the spotlight, departments tolerate an “us vs. them” culture that implicitly condones the code of silence.
In 2011, a “hurt feelings” poster hung on the wall at police headquarters in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a suburban city less than 20 minutes from Minneapolis. The sign instructed officers who wanted to report a grievance to “check all that apply.” Among the choices:
“I am thin- skinned.”
“I have woman- like hormones.”
“I am a queer.”
“I am a p----.”
“I am a little bitch.”
“All of the above.”
A Minnetonka officer who has since left the force reported the poster to Minnesota labor officials.
“I cannot go to anyone and have to stay silent,” she wrote in her journal at the time.
After USA TODAY sent a copy of the poster to police officials, spokesperson Andrew Wittenborg said an external review in 2011 determined other officers did not have qualms about reporting misconduct. He added that the department mandated additional ethics training and reprimanded the officer who put up the poster.
“The ‘ Hurt Feelings Report’ is offensive and disturbing,” Wittenborg said. “We regret that it was posted.”
Rigging the system
At both the state and local levels, unions have lobbied for laws and negotiated contracts that protect problem officers and deter those inclined to turn them in.
At least 10 states have adopted statutes known as the “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.” In states without them, unions have fought for similar provisions during contract negotiations with city officials. Originally intended to ensure police defendants are treated fairly, in practice, they grant those officers protections never afforded to other people accused of crimes.
USA TODAY analyzed more than 80 state laws and municipal union contracts and found that about 30 contained at least one provision that could be used to shield officers accused of misconduct or make it more difficult for another officer to expose it.
Many police department policy manuals also lack specific protections for officers who want to report misconduct. In a sampling of 43 manuals reviewed by USA TODAY, just three include the word “whistleblower.”
In Lake Wales, Florida, Whitney Dukes said she got nowhere when she tried to hold a fellow officer, Travis Worley, accountable for using a racial slur against a Black man in 2016.
Worley, who is white, shouted, “F--you, n-----” at the man he was trying to arrest, Dukes said. She said she reported the incident to a supervisor, who said of the Black man, “Well, did he deserve it?”
Worley was named the 2019 Lake Wales’ Officer of the Year. In 2020,
Dukes reiterated her complaint about the earlier incident.
This time the department investigated. They concluded Worley had used “profane language” but found there was no evidence he used a racial slur. He was suspended for a single day.
Dukes said her supervisors began disciplining her for trivial infractions, including for time she missed while serving as an Army reservist.
“It was overwhelming,” she said. “There was so much anxiety. I felt like I was drowning.”
She eventually resigned and took a job as a school resource officer in a different jurisdiction but says she holds no animosity towards her former bosses.
Worley did not respond to requests for comment. He remains employed with the Lake Wales Police.
Lake Wales Police Chief Chris Velasquez told USA TODAY he immediately investigated Dukes’ complaint and she never faced retaliation. He said detectives determined Worley had used profane language but found insufficient evidence that he used the slur.
Weaponizing internal affairs
Law enforcement agencies around the country have resisted calls for outside investigations by arguing that internal affairs personnel can handle misconduct complaints effectively and impartially.
In dozens of cases reviewed by USA TODAY, department leaders twisted the process, opening inquiries against whistleblowers and even their own internal investigators.
In Springfield, Oregon, in 2016, Lt. Scott McKee investigated a complaint from a prisoner who claimed he’d been framed by a police detective and one of his informants. McKee found that the allegation had merit, and then worked with the prisoner’s lawyer to free him seven years into his 20- year sentence.
While the prisoner’s release was pending, McKee began investigating a fellow officer for excessive force, he said in a recent interview.
His actions outraged others on the force, McKee said. One wrote an offensive term on the back of a lithograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that was hanging in McKee’s office. Another replaced a family photo with a meme of the officer’s severed head and the caption, “HEADHUNTING – It’s not just for natives.” A third told other officers he would take McKee down.
Union officials accused McKee of perjuring himself during a disciplinary hearing for the other officer. McKee said it was all a misunderstanding, but the chief nonetheless placed him on leave.
After six months, an independent auditor concluded there was no evidence McKee had intentionally lied, but the chief didn’t let him come back to work, McKee said.
In 2019, McKee filed a notice of claim – a precursor to a lawsuit – with the city and the department. In an agreement reached before the case went to court, McKee agreed to resign in exchange for a cash settlement.
“If you lose the support from your chief and you’re under scrutiny that’s initiated internally, you’re probably not going to win,” he said. “You can’t.”
Andrew Shearer, who was sworn in as interim police chief in May, did not specifically address McKee’s allegations. In general, he said, he is trying to learn from past mistakes and root out retaliation and discrimination.
Springfield Police Association President Robert Conrad said McKee was a sloppy investigator, not a whistleblower.
“To say that we deliberately attacked him because he came after a bad cop is simply not true,” Conrad said. “If we have a bad cop, we’re the first ones who don’t want him around.”
Gary Tiffee, whom McKee helped free from prison, is trying to rebuild a life for himself and his children, who were 4 and 5 when he was locked up and are now teenagers. He knows how lucky he is that McKee bothered to follow up on a complaint from an inmate.
“He had the integrity to bring true justice to the surface,” Tiffee said. “This guy gave up his 34- year police career for me – to be honest and to tell the truth.”
Gina Barton, Brett Murphy and Daphne Duret are reporters on USA TODAY’s investigative team.
Daphne is a 2021- 22 Knight- Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan. Contact Daphne at dduret@ gannett. com, @ dd_ writes, by signal at 772- 486- 5562. Contact Brett at brett. murphy@ usatoday. com, @ brettMmurphy, by Signal at 508- 5235195. Contact Gina at gbarton@ gannett. com, @ writerbarton.
Andrew Ford of the Arizona Republic, USA TODAY’s Tricia Nadolny and Dan Keemahill, and interns Tyreye Morris and Brenna Smith contributed.