Activists demand removal of NC officer fired from last job for using excessive force

A group of Alamance County residents is calling for the firing of a Graham police officer who was fired from his previous department for using excessive force.

At a Thursday press conference, activists said they also want the Graham police chief to resign and the department to be “rebuilt from the ground up.”

“Kristy Cole, you do not have your house in order,” Ann Jones said, calling out the chief. “Therefore, you do not deserve a house in Graham.”

Officer Douglas Strader was hired by the Graham Police Department in March, six months after he was fired from the Greensboro Police Department, according to personnel records obtained by The News & Observer.

Strader, who was a police corporal in Greensboro and who had worked for that department for 16 years, was terminated after the city found he had fired at a fleeing vehicle in violation of department policy.

He also was one of eight responding officers in a 2018 incident that resulted in Marcus Smith, a Black man, dying while in police custody.

Smith’s death is the subject of a lawsuit his family filed against the city of Greensboro. In 2018, then-district attorney for Guilford County Doug Henderson said none of the responding officers had displayed “criminal negligence” in Smith’s death.

The N&O was unable to reach Strader. Cole and Assistant Chief Rodney King declined requests for interviews.

Activists seek Strader’s removal, termination of leadership

The Rev. Curtis Gatewood, the founder of JUSTICE Ministration and the Stop Killing Us Solutions Campaign, is among those seeking Strader’s removal.

“We shouldn’t even have to have this fight,” Gatewood said. “The hiring of a police officer who has committed deadly force is wrong. It is arrogant. It is sending the wrong message — it is saying to Black people in Graham and in surrounding areas: ‘We do not care about your lives.’”

JUSTICE Ministration, a faith-based social justice organization, has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, and sent a letter to the N.C. Department of Justice regarding Strader’s hire.

But Gatewood emphasized their efforts are not just about one officer.

“The reason why we want Strader terminated is not anything personal to do with Strader,” he said. “But it is a larger issue as it pertains to the need to be able to keep people safe.”

At the press conference Thursday, other activists emphasized the lack of trust between Graham police and Black community organizers in particular. They have protested frequently over the past year, and dozens have come under arrest.

Faith Cook highlighted officers’ use of pepper vapor on participants in a Oct. 31 march to the polls, including small children.

On that day, the trust “broke,” she said. “Instead of them using that space, in between time, to try to rectify what happened, to try to find a common ground and bridge that gap with the community, they in turn came back with the hiring of Douglas Strader.”

“That was not the answer,” Cook said, “and it further divides the community from the police department.”

Avery Harvey named other officers who make activists feel unsafe, including Officer Marcus Pollock, who was involved in the death of Jaquyn Light, a Black man shot and killed by Graham police in January 2020. The district attorney cleared Pollock of wrongdoing, finding that Pollock’s gun went off when Light ran into him while fleeing. Although Graham officers have body cameras, Pollock’s was not turned on.

In an emailed statement, Capt. Daniel Sisk of the Graham Police Department declined to say what the department knew of Strader’s involvement in the two use-of-force incidents in Greensboro when it hired him. His background, personnel and prior employment history were “extensively reviewed” by the department, he said.

“Officer Strader overwhelmingly exceeded the rigorous standards required in the extensive hiring process of the Graham Police Department in addition to the standards required by the NC Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission,” Sisk said.

When reached by email, King provided the same response.

JUSTICE Ministration has also called for the removal of Cole and King, who it says demonstrated a failure of leadership and judgment in hiring Strader. King was also the first to deploy pepper vapor on Oct. 31.

Interim Graham City Manager Aaron Holland declined to comment on activists’ demands. Mayor Jerry Peterman did not respond to a request for comment.

Excessive force violation in Greensboro

In the early hours of Oct. 27, 2019, Strader and three other Greensboro officers responded to a reported disturbance involving gunfire.

Police took a suspect into custody, but a vehicle believed to be associated with the disturbance began to flee and officers fired at it, according to a city news release. No one was hurt by the officers’ gunfire.

Strader would later appeal his firing.

“The greatest responsibility that a police officer has is the obligation to use deadly force appropriately,” Greensboro City Manager David Parrish said in a letter upholding Strader’s termination. “A single mistake, error or lapse in judgment while using deadly force can have tragic and long-lasting consequences for our community.”

Activists have frequently called for a ban on officers firing at moving vehicles, which was one of the 8 Can’t Wait policy reforms that got national attention after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In 2020, the Greensboro Police Department officially adopted a policy banning officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in cases where there is no other way to stop a deadly threat, Parrish said in an email.

Though the department did not have an explicit ban at the time of the incident, Strader’s action was cited as a violation of the department’s directive to use “no more force than necessary.”

Gatewood referenced Parrish’s letter upholding the firing in questioning Strader’s hiring in Graham.

“What is it going to take for Graham PD to understand that if it is a violation in Greensboro, it should be a violation in Graham?” Gatewood said.

And in 2018, just after midnight on Sept. 8, Marcus Smith, a 38-year-old man, approached Greensboro police officers in an agitated state and asked for help, according to body camera footage released from the incident. He can be heard requesting medical attention, and agreeing to sit in the back of a police car before displaying extreme distress.

Officers applied a “Ripp Hobble” restraint, binding his hands and feet behind his back. Moments later, Smith stopped breathing, and officers removed the restraints, according to the footage.

He was taken to the hospital, where he died, police said.

The manner of death was ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner, who said in an autopsy report that Smith died of a sudden cardiopulmonary arrest due to the prone restraint, drug and alcohol use and cardiovascular disease, according to a copy of the autopsy report obtained by The N&O.

Smith’s family has since filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city, the county and the responding officers and emergency medical technicians.

“All of those eight [officers] either participated hands on, or failed to intervene and stop it,” said Lewis Pitts, a retired civil rights attorney who has advocated for the city to compensate Smith’s parents.

Alan Duncan, an attorney representing the city and the officers in the lawsuit, said he cannot comment while litigation continues.

‘Wandering officers’ more likely to be fired again

Ben Grunwald, an associate professor of law at Duke University, said data is sparse on “wandering officers” who find work at a new agency after being fired from a police department.

But in Florida, where such data does exist, Grunwald found such officers tended to move “to agencies that are smaller, with fewer resources.” He added that those agencies tended to serve slightly larger communities of color.

“Police officers who have previously been fired and get another job tend to be fired about twice as often as other officers,” Grunwald said. “They also get moral character violations alleged against them at higher rates.”

In North Carolina, an agency that terminates a certified law enforcement officer must submit an affidavit of separation to the Criminal Justice Standards Division, according to Laura Brewer, spokesperson for state Attorney General Josh Stein. The standards commission reviews the records to evaluate whether a firing should result in an officer losing the right to continue working in law enforcement.

Brewer provided a copy of Strader’s affidavit to The N&O, but it was heavily redacted, with the section labeled “Reason for Separation” entirely blacked out. The N&O was not able to find out if the Graham Police Department had seen the affidavit when it hired Strader.

Brewer also did not say whether the state investigates every firing or opened an investigation after Strader was fired. When asked if his case went before a probable cause committee, Brewer said that information is not a public record.

Legislative proposals, and other possible solutions

Grunwald said more information is needed on why departments hire officers who have previously been fired.

A few possible reasons arose in his research, he said.

First, police departments might lack the information, with background checks either not being conducted or not finding the former termination. Most states, according to Grunwald, only track whether an officer has been decertified.

Another reason, Grunwald said, is that a department might not be attentive to the “social costs of hiring a bad officer.”

“Many police officers interact with hundreds of people in a year,” he explained. “If you’ve got a police officer who is just a bad cop, who uses excessive force, who lies, who engages in racial discrimination, or other forms of discrimination — there are going to be lots of people who those officers could harm over the course of a given day or year.”

Grunwald said one potential solution would be to increase the legal liability of departments for the actions of officers. But he added that civil rights activists and legal scholars have pushed for such a change for decades without success.

“The other thing is, it may not be that they’re discounting the cost. It may just be that this is who they think a good cop is,” Grunwald said. “This comes down to just the culture of police as an institution … and I don’t know how you solve this problem, except to change the people who make the hiring decision.”

In December, the N.C. Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice issued over 100 recommendations, among them tracking officers frequently accused of using excessive force, and preventing officers fired for excessive force from being rehired by a different agency.

And in April, two bipartisan bills were introduced in the N.C. General Assembly to prevent officers caught lying under oath in court from evading consequences by changing agencies, and to require law enforcement agencies in the state to use the National Decertification Index when backgrounding candidates.

The N.C. Association of Chiefs of Police supports both bills, The N&O has reported.

But while wandering officers may be an important issue, Grunwald said it is also “some of the lowest hanging fruit.”

“Wandering officers are problematic, but most officers that engage in misconduct have never been fired,” he said. “So focusing the conversation on the easiest part — the lowest hanging fruit — is in no way going to solve all the big problems that we have in policing: All of the other officers who either aren’t fired because the agency isn’t willing to do that, or because it’s really hard to fire officers.”

Grunwald added that only 2% of officers in Florida are wandering officers.

This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Activists demand removal of NC officer fired from last job for using excessive force."