Cover Story: The bad cops club

At first glance, it might seem an isolated event. A Fulton County deputy working off duty is accused of shooting an innocent bystander. The unlucky bastard fell victim to a freak accident. Someone must have pulled a gun, and this guy got caught in the mess. The deputy’s probably not to blame.

???Club rules ?How misbehaving cops stay in the ranks????

?You never know, though. Maybe the deputy could have shown a little more control over his trigger finger. Maybe it’s worth a peek into his personnel file, to see what else he’s done.

Turns out Herman Ingram’s file reads like a character profile of a deputy from days of old, a regular gun-slinging rogue who stepped straight off the set of a dusty Western. The alleged shooting wasn’t exactly an anomaly. Ingram, who like most deputies worked in the jail, was cited for numerous similar misdeeds, like pointing guns at innocents and driving drunk.

It appeared that Ingram was the exception.

Then came a rumor about a man named Tim Peck. He was picking up a to-go order at a pub when he got into an argument with an off-duty deputy. The deputy broke both his legs. Medical documents and a sheriff’s incident report proved the tale true. Fulton Deputy Kelvin Smith pulled his baton and beat Peck’s knees and shins until one of each shattered.

A look at Smith’s personnel file revealed 10 previous allegations of physical abuse on jail inmates. Smith was exonerated in each case — even the one in which he failed a lie detector test, his accuser passed and 10 witnesses backed the accuser’s story.

In September, CL published a story about the assault on Peck. Since then, internal affairs issued its decision that Deputy Smith did no wrong. No lie detector tests were given. Peck wasn’t even interviewed.

Stand the two incidents side-by-side, and they seem more like red flags than coincidence. You wonder how long the line of delinquent deputies might be, how often their aggression seeps from the jail into the streets and what Fulton County Sheriff Jacquelyn Barrett is doing to control wayward cops.

An examination of 1,500 pages of internal affairs documents shows there’s something wrong with the system that’s supposed to keep deputies in line. Fulton investigators are hesitant to find that a deputy has committed physical abuse — a violation that carries mandatory termination. The Fulton County Personnel Board, which handles appeals of terminations, has overturned the only two physical abuse dismissals in recent years — due to mistakes the board blames on the department. And the independent state agency that attempts to regulate cops’ behavior often is in the dark about the misdeeds of Barrett’s deputies. Agency officials claim that Georgia law didn’t give them enough power to enforce agency rules.

The result: Fulton’s bad cops aren’t going anywhere. Neither are their problems.

Members only

?This is the jail. Rice Street, Fulton County. Six hundred and fifty deputies work here. They guard. They feed. They counsel. They protect.

It’s tough work. Inmates aren’t a fun bunch. Especially in these numbers. Some nights, there are 1,000 more inmates than beds. And there are countless attitudes. Yeah, they’ll push a deputy. And push, and push. Sometimes, beating an inmate is the best a deputy can do to keep the jail in order. Nobody spends an easy eight hours here.

And at the end of the shift? The end’s hard to find. When a deputy is off duty, he’s searching for diversions. But sometimes he loses track of the line between work and leisure. Except that on the outside, he’s no longer the law. And that’s when knowing how to act gets tricky. Especially when alcohol enters the equation.

It takes a certain person to do a deputy’s job. It’s tough work, even off the clock. Deputies have to do what they have to do.

Here’s how some of them do it.

Drinking and Driving — Part I
At 5:30 a.m. internal affairs got the call. It came from a Henry County police officer. Someone needed to come down to the Waffle House off Highway 138. There was trouble.

A Department of Transportation worker had been the first to notice the silver Mercury Sable on the morning of April 5, 2000. It was backing down the entrance ramp to I-75. It was all over the road. It nearly hit the worker’s car.

A Waffle House waitress looked out the window and watched the Sable tear into the lot like a zigzagging bullet. It swerved, jumped the curb and landed diagonally in front of the entrance. “I was beginning to wonder if we were about to become a drive-in restaurant,” she later would tell internal affairs.

The waitress saw the driver lay his head on the steering wheel. She took an order. When she looked up, the driver was gone.

A police officer pulled up, glanced inside the car and saw a .40-caliber Glock on the driver’s seat. He opened the unlocked door. The car smelled like alcohol. The officer found a badge under the driver’s seat. It was printed with the words “Fulton County Sheriff’s Department” and “D. Johnson.”

A half-hour later, three boys knocked on the door of the Waffle House bathroom and roused its occupant. Deputy Deon Johnson opened the door and made his way toward the parking lot. “He swayed when he walked,” the Henry County officer wrote in an incident report, “and his clothes were in disarray.”

The officer asked Johnson to take a breath test. Johnson refused. The officer didn’t charge Johnson with a crime. He instead handed him over to a Fulton County internal affairs investigator. “I was going to call for a ride,” Johnson would later say during an interrogation, “when I was informed that my department was notified and someone was already in route.”

When he arrived in Atlanta at about 7 a.m., Deputy Johnson sat down for an interview with internal affairs Sgt. Leighton Graham. Graham noted that Johnson appeared confused. Johnson mentioned that a Henry County cop — or maybe it was a fellow Fulton Sheriff’s deputy — had been looking for the driver of a Sable.

“OK, prior to going to the Waffle House, had you been drinking?” Graham asked.

“Exactly, yes I had,” Johnson answered.

“Approximately how much had you drank?”

“Probably two glasses ... ah ... little bit of ah ... probably a glass of ah ... Martel and ah ... probably a beer or two.”

“A glass of Martel and probably a beer or two.”

“Exactly.”

“OK. At this time, are you intoxicated?”

“No,” Johnson said. “Not to my knowledge.”

Graham then asked Johnson to take a breath test. Johnson refused. He told Graham the Sable belonged to his girlfriend and that she had been driving. Graham told him the Waffle House staff and customers had seen him behind the wheel. No one saw a woman, anywhere.

“To my knowledge, she was right there,” Johnson said. “But, you know, if that’s what [they] said, I can only go on what ... If they’re saying ... I can only go on ... if that’s what they’re saying and I’m saying what I’m saying ... we can only be one alike.”

Graham asked Johnson for a detailed written statement. Johnson said he couldn’t give one. He said he didn’t feel well.

Johnson had been written up in the past, for “excessive use of intoxicants while off duty” and “conduct unbecoming an officer” after a fight at a sports bar. He also had received a traffic citation on his way to work for running into a homeless man. The man went to Grady Hospital with critical internal injuries.

But Jones had nothing to worry about with the Waffle House incident. He walked away with a written warning.

Fired, almost for good
It was Jan. 19, 2000, dinner time, and Deputy Cleveland Solomon was ordering the inmates to line up outside the jail cafeteria. Michael Calloway didn’t want to stand in line, Solomon claims. And he didn’t want to pick up a tray. He wasn’t following orders. So Solomon pulled him away from the line.

At the same time, two nurses took a break from their shift at the jail clinic. They walked out of the exam room and met two deputies working clinic security. All four watched as Solomon shoved Calloway out of the cafeteria area and into view.

The beating started abruptly.

Solomon hit Calloway over and over, the nurses told internal affairs. Calloway didn’t put up a fight, both deputies noted. One of them ran into the room where the beating continued. He didn’t run to stop Solomon, according to his statement to internal affairs. He ran to help Solomon “restrain” the inmate. At the deputy’s urging, Solomon put the inmate in handcuffs.

The deputy walked back to where the nurses stood. They told him Solomon had kicked the inmate in the face.

The two nurses returned to the exam room, and Solomon walked in a moment later, inmate Calloway in tow. The nurses offered to treat a small cut on Solomon’s hand, but he refused. When Solomon and Calloway left, “he began to hit the inmate once again,” according to one nurse. Solomon then took the inmate to the jail’s main clinic.

Neither nurse had offered assistance to Calloway, whose face was bleeding.

The deputy wrote in a statement to internal affairs that the blood flow from Calloway’s face came from a “bite to the lip caused by himself.” Solomon alleged that Calloway “stopped and looked at me as if he wanted to physically harm me.” So, Solomon claimed, he had to “take him to the floor to be cuffed.”

Solomon, who is required to file a report any time he uses force, described the force used in this case as “minimal.”

Then-Fulton County Chief Deputy Gregory Henderson punished Solomon with a one-day suspension. But when Sheriff Jacquelyn Barrett learned about the case, she fired Solomon. Within six months, the deputy was back on the job. The county Personnel Board overturned Barrett’s decision, ruling that she had no right to change the suspension to a termination.

“The board’s attorney said that by law the sheriff had exceeded her authority,” says Personnel Board Director Bob Brandes. “We are in the United States, and we do have to do things legally. And people have due process, even somebody who you may feel has done something wrong.”

‘On the street or in jail’
To give any indication of what it’s like inside the head of a deputy who handles inmates, take the statements of Wayne Bolden. During an internal affairs probe into one of nine alleged cases of inmate abuse, an investigator asked Bolden if he was mad during his run-in with inmate Denandias Watson.

“Sergeant, what do you call mad?” Bolden asked, becoming “very irate,” in the investigator’s words. “I wasn’t mad, because if I was, I would have hit him. And I wasn’t angry, because if I was, I would have slammed him to the ground.”

Bolden’s actions outside the jail also have been called into question. In January, a Fayette County sheriff’s deputy arrested Bolden at his home. Bolden’s wife claimed he assaulted her with a weapon. The case remains under investigation, not by the Fayette County investigators, who cleared Bolden, but by the state agency that accredits and can revoke peace officers.

Watson, an inmate who got into a minor cursing match with Bolden, claimed the deputy grabbed him around his neck and squeezed him into dizziness. Bolden denied touching the inmate, but 16 other inmates watched the March 1999 attack. Their descriptions of the assault matched Watson’s. “They observed Deputy Bolden walk up to inmate Watson,” according to internal affairs documents, “and begin choking him almost to the point of lifting him off the floor.”

One inmate who was standing 3 feet away told internal affairs that Bolden, after releasing Watson from the chokehold, said: “I’ll fuck your ass up on the street or in jail.”

Internal affairs concluded that Bolden “knowingly submitted an incident report which contained untrue statements and omissions of relevant facts.”

He was punished with a written warning.

Two years later, in March 2001, Bolden and several other deputies allegedly crossed paths in the jail with accused cop killer Jamil Al-Amin. The former Black Panther previously known as H. Rap Brown, Al-Amin is awaiting trial on charges that he shot to death one Fulton deputy and wounded another.

The sheriff’s department refused to hand over copies of the file outlining the alleged abuse of Al-Amin but did provide one document relating to the 100-page investigation, a copy of a letter to Bolden. The letter states that Bolden intimidated a friend and fellow inmate of Al-Amin, rattling off “fighting words that can be reasonably inferred as a threat to do harm to someone or gain revenge.”

“You come to my house and I’ll even the score,” the letter quotes Bolden as saying. “I know where you live. I have your address.”

The department did not provide documentation of what punishment Bolden ultimately received.

Not for you to see
Deputy Robert Durham’s attitude Jan. 29, 2001, brought three words to detention officer C. Coppage’s mind: “out of control.” That’s how she described Durham to internal affairs.

Based on Coppage’s two-page statement, internal affairs ruled that Durham attacked an inmate without reason and “clearly crossed the line.”

Coppage was waiting for an elevator when Durham walked by. She watched him grab the inmate by the chain of his handcuffs and slam his head against the wall so hard “it produced a sound upon impact.”

Coppage’s statement tells how she followed Durham to the holding tank, repeatedly trying to take the inmate from him. But Durham held the inmate tight and yelled at her, “Get out.”

In his written statement, Durham denied hitting the inmate’s head against the wall. He put together a case file on the incident and handed it over to a sergeant, who would pass it on to internal affairs.

As the sergeant was reading through the file, he noticed that Coppage’s statement was missing. Internal affairs’ summary of the case states: “Deputy Durham initially tried to delete the written statement of D.O. Coppage, but he (Sgt. Griffin), ordered Deputy Durham to include Coppage’s statement in the report package.”

Internal affairs concluded that the evidence in the case shows that Durham physically abused the inmate and tried to “misrepresent the facts.”

Chief Deputy Caudell Jones, however, decided that Durham’s only violation was verbal abuse. Jones wrote Durham a letter stating he might suspend him for a day. But Jones opted instead to give Durham a written warning.

In his nine years as a deputy, Durham has been written up 20 times, on charges ranging from tardiness to alleged physical abuse. He’s received a total two suspensions — and 12 written warnings.

Burst eardrum No. 1
On Oct. 7, 1999, an inmate named Willie Parks was admitted to Grady Hospital and treated for a ruptured eardrum. He said Deputy Roderick Bradford was to blame.

Bradford said he “placed his hand gently” on Parks’ back and slapped him in the chest, to keep the rowdy inmate at bay.

The inmate said Bradford hit him on the side of the head. That blow — and not a hand on the back or slap to his chest — was what started the blood flowing out of his ear, he told internal affairs.

A month-and-a-half later, Parks took a lie detector test. When asked if Bradford grabbed him and hit his left ear, he answered yes. The machine concluded he was telling the truth.

Bradford took the test, too. According to the polygraphist administering the test, Bradford was “rude and not cooperative.” The polygraphist then asked Bradford if he grabbed Parks and hit him in the head. Bradford said no. The machine concluded he was lying.

The deputy got a letter in January 2000 informing him that the sheriff’s department was considering firing him for bursting Parks’ eardrum and lying about it. Two weeks later, he got a letter stating he would instead receive a written warning.

In the next two years, Bradford was accused of six more cases of inmate abuse. None was substantiated. He was informed, however, in a September letter from Chief Jones: “Please, be advised to use precautionary measures of Use of Force at all times when in contact with inmates.”

Drinking and Driving — Part II
Deon Johnson’s driving didn’t improve much in the year after the Waffle House incident.

On June 17, a man named Benjamin Smith pulled into the parking lot of a sports bar on Ponce de Leon Avenue, according to an Atlanta police report. Two men jumped from their car and yelled at Smith that they were going to kick his ass for taking their parking spot. As Smith was driving home 45 minutes later, he realized the two guys from earlier were tailing him.

The car crept up, the report states. It rear-ended Smith’s car. Both vehicles edged closer to City Hall East. Smith dialed 911 on his cell phone. Seconds later, he pulled into the entrance of Atlanta police headquarters.

“You need to get that guy,” Smith yelled to two Atlanta officers, pointing at the car making a quick U-turn, the report states. “He is chasing me. He just rammed my car.”

Officer M. Connor flashed his cruiser’s lights and took off. He caught up with the car and pulled it over. The driver stepped out. He walked toward Connor.

“Put your hands in the air,” Connor warned. But the man reached into his back pocket instead. Connor repeated the order.

“Check my wallet,” the man said, raising his hands in the air.

“Are you a police officer?” Connor asked.

“Yes,” the man answered.

The officer pulled the man’s wallet and found a Fulton Sheriff’s Department identification card, according to the report. Then he peered through the car’s window; a half-empty beer bottle sat on the driver’s seat, next to a semi-automatic pistol. An open bottle of Southern Comfort lay on the back seat.

There was no record of this incident in the internal affairs documents the sheriff department provided CL. According to Atlanta police documents, Deon Johnson was charged with DUI, improper lane change, following too closely and open container. The case is pending.

Rage on
Like Deon Johnson, a deputy named Orlando Jones had his own brush with road rage. In 1996, Jones was driving on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive when the car in front of him drifted into his lane. Jones, who was off duty, screamed at the driver, threatened to arrest him and motioned for him to pull over, according to the driver, who filed a complaint with internal affairs. The driver locked his car door and rolled up his windows as Jones approached. “What do you think this badge is?” Jones screamed. “What do you think this gun is?”

The driver wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department that day, stating he was concerned about what might happen the next time Jones got angry with someone. “I do not feel he is in enough control to make a proper judgment or decision,” the driver wrote, “and the outcome could be much more serious.”

Two years later, an inmate claimed Jones caught him drinking water out of a faucet in a mop closet and punished him by squeezing his throat and punching the right side of his head. Jones didn’t fill out a report on the incident; he denied it occurred.

But when Jones took a lie detector test a month later and said he didn’t assault the inmate, the test showed he wasn’t telling the truth.

Jones got a written warning. The letter made reference to past physical abuse allegations and stated: “Severe disciplinary actions will be taken if another incident like this shall occur.”

A month after the mop closet assault, another inmate found himself in a dark utility room with Jones. The inmate alleged that Jones brought him there because the deputy thought the inmate had cursed about the television being turned off.

In the utility room, Jones hit the inmate in the head and kicked him, the inmate claimed. Although Jones disputed that he touched the inmate, he did tell investigators that he took him to the utility room to strip search and counsel him. Jones said that after the counseling, he brought the inmate to the jail clinic.

“So you had to strip search him to find out why he used profane language?” internal affairs Sgt. Graham asked Jones, according to a 16-page transcribed interview.

“I had to strip search him before I dealt with him,” Jones answered. “As I said already, for my own safety.”

A few questions later, Graham asked, “So you didn’t know whether he had any weapons on his body ... yet you removed him from the [cell] with no handcuffs on, took him down the hall into a utility room alone ... and strip searched him, alone?”

“Right,” Jones said.

When asked why he took the inmate to the clinic, Jones said, “That was just precaution or formality because I’m not able to determine if he had some injuries or not.”

“Why would he have received any injuries?” Graham asked. “All you did was took [sic] him down to the corridor and strip searched him. Correct?”

“Why ... As I said, it was just done as a precaution so I don’t know if he received any injuries or not when I placed him against the wall. I don’t know what he was gon’ say, so I took him.”

Again, a lie detector test was scheduled. Again, Jones said he didn’t hit the inmate. Again, he failed.

Although the sheriff had written in a past letter that Jones might face dismissal if he hit someone else and failed to be truthful about it, he received only a five-day suspension.

Burst eardrum No. 2
Deputies Jones and Johnson were working the 3-11 p.m. shift together Aug. 10, 1999, when an inmate named Rodney Hubbard stepped up to the “pipe” — the intercom between the floor of the jail and the tower where the two deputies stood guard.

Hubbard was doing janitorial work under Jones’ watch. He asked to use the bathroom.

“Didn’t I tell you I’m not gonna let you use the fucking bathroom?” Jones yelled, according to the inmate’s statement to internal affairs. “You always have to use the bathroom every time you come up here.”

“This is fucked up,” Hubbard answered. “I can’t use the bathroom?”

Jones ordered Hubbard into the tower. “Who in the fuck do you think you are talking to?” Jones started screaming, according to Hubbard. Jones grabbed Hubbard’s face, the inmate claimed, and punched the left side of his head.

Hubbard said Johnson and Sgt. Debra Jackson watched. When Jones let go of him, he said, “I should kick your motherfucking ass.”

“For what?” answered Hubbard. He claimed he realized at that moment there was something wrong with his left ear.

“I can’t hear,” he said.

Jones told him to go sweep the gym and come back. Deputy Johnson led the inmate out of the tower, down to the floor. “Are you all right, man?” Hubbard recalled Johnson asking. “Are you OK?”

“No. I can’t hear.”

Johnson allegedly gave Hubbard a tissue to catch the blood dripping from his ear. But the deputy refused the inmate’s plea to go to the clinic.

A couple of hours later, Hubbard called for a sergeant and said he needed to see a doctor. The jail physician who examined Hubbard noted his ear was “full of blood.” The next day, Hubbard went to Grady Hospital and was diagnosed with traumatic perforation of the eardrum.

Internal affairs learned of the injury and interviewed the three guards. Sgt. Jackson said she wasn’t in the tower while Hubbard was there. Johnson said he didn’t see any hitting or injury.

Jones said he never touched Hubbard; he merely counseled him and then sent him on his way.

Both Jones and Johnson did remember a valuable detail a few days later, when they gave internal affairs their written statements.

Jones wrote that while he was reprimanding Hubbard for asking too many questions through the pipe, Hubbard seemed to have trouble understanding him. “I didn’t know the inmate had some type of hearing problem,” Jones wrote. “The hearing problem he alleged ... apparently was only a problem when he was being told he was out of line.”

Johnson, in his written statement, recalled that he once heard someone mention that Hubbard “always had a hearing problem.”

Two months later, on Oct. 20, 1999, the two deputies and Sgt. Jackson went to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation headquarters to take lie detector tests. But Johnson, once he got there, refused the test — just as he refused the breath test after the Waffle House incident.

With no polygraph machine running, the GBI investigator asked Johnson a question anyway: Did you see Deputy Jones strike the inmate? “Deputy Johnson nodded his head up and down,” the investigator wrote to Fulton internal affairs.

Johnson refused the test again, two months later. When he finally submitted in January 2000, the test was inconclusive. Internal affairs noted the results “showed a pattern of a person who would hold there (sic) breath or try to control there (sic) breathing to get around the instruments.”

Jones and Jackson took their tests as scheduled. Jones denied hitting the inmate. Jackson denied witnessing the encounter. Both of them failed.

After the test, Jackson recanted her statement, telling the GBI agent she had been in the tower and had heard Jones cursing the inmate. She still denied seeing anything.

After Jones failed the test, the agent asked him to explain what really happened with Hubbard in the tower. “Deputy Jones made a poking motion with his left hand and a[n] open-handed slapping motion with his right hand,” a GBI investigator noted. He wrote that Jones would not confirm the beating in words. He would only say that he “could have hit inmate Hubbard, but he could not remember doing it.”

For being untruthful about their involvement, Jackson got a written warning and Johnson got a two-day suspension.

For striking the inmate so hard it cost him a portion of his hearing, and for hiding the truth, Jones received a five-day suspension.

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com??