DOUGLASVILLE, GA (CBS46) – A police officer filed a lawsuit against the Douglasville Police Department accusing the department of racial profiling.
Officer Derrick Bailey said that he was fired twice in less than five years because he spoke out about racial profiling at the department.
According to an Internal Affairs investigation by the department, Bailey said he began to document things that he didn’t think were right.
“I saw racial profiling quite a bit,” Bailey said. “I saw unlawful traffic stops, unlawful searches of individuals. They would stop individuals without probable cause.”
The police department said that is not the case.
Bailey was fired by Douglasville police in 2012. It happened after a verbal disagreement with a Walmart loss-prevention officer during a shoplifting call. Bailey was fired after Walmart complained.
He believes he was fired because he was retaliated against after speaking out about several incidents of racism and racial profiling.
The former officer appealed the decision and brought up instances where he felt racism and racial profiling had taken place at the department.
In the lawsuit, Bailey said that a lieutenant made the statement in a morning meeting that “we’re going to run a road block today. Let’s go get us some Mexicans.”
The department provided mandatory profiling and diversity training classes to officers as a result of the internal investigation.
After Douglasville police reviewed several cases, Bailey was rehired. But he says the racism and racial profiling didn’t stop.
He recalled to us an incident he mentioned in the lawsuit.
“This dispatcher described a black male as a ‘black male wearing all black, black jeans, long black dreads.’ She said he was ‘as black as asphalt,’ and those things were common,” Bailey said. “There was another one [where] she said ‘as black as shoe polish.'”
That same internal investigation concluded it was the dispatcher reading notes from the call taker.
Internal Affairs also looked into Douglasville police’s information technology department.
“I received a login name. The name was ‘Peccary.’ When you look it up, the meaning was ‘black pig.’ There were other officers who received login names that were racially insensitive when you looked at it. Names like ‘Lemur,’ which is a primate,” Bailey said.
But that information technology officer told internal investigators that she developed a process of using animal names for passwords in 2009.
Bailey joined the Douglasville Police Department in 2010 after spending 16 years with the Atlanta police.
The City of Douglasville would not comment on Bailey’s case because of the pending lawsuit.
Douglasville Mayor Harvey Persons would only say the following:
“We don’t put up with profiling,” Persons said. “If there were isolated cases brought to our attention, we would address them.”
Douglasville has 92 officers, of which 14 are African-American and five are Hispanic.
The city said it is actively trying to hire more minority officers.
Source: http://www.cbs46.com/story/27726210/officer-accuses-douglasville-police-of-racial-profiling