Two former Fort Worth police officers claim in a lawsuit filed on Friday that they were fired because they complained about a racist photo showing a sergeant holding a noose around a snowman’s head with a police cap on its head and a banana in its hand.
Former officers James Dunn and Maurice Middleton, who are both African-American, said the photo offended them and they had filed an internal complaint. The photo was taken in 2010 outside the department’s traffic division, they said.
Days later, they said they were accused of falsifying traffic tickets to collect overtime they did not work, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Fort Worth.
Police Spokeswoman Officer Tamara Pena said the department does not comment on pending lawsuits.
The officers and several others were terminated and charged with tampering with government documents and theft, but prosecutors later dropped the entire case.
According to the lawsuit, a white officer who had falsified tickets was not fired until several years later because she was having an affair with the supervisor who was in charge of investigating the ticket scandal.
In August 2014, an outside review of racial complaints concluded there had been a hostile work environment in the department and that in at least one case, high-level supervisors knew about harassment and did nothing to stop it.
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Former police chief Jeffrey Halstead, who also is named in the lawsuit, apologized in a YouTube video.
“Two of our employees within the traffic division were disrespected and retaliated against simply because of the color of their skin,” he said. “It was very apparent within the report that even I made some very poor judgment decisions and I have apologized to any and everyone that I have hurt.”
Halstead resigned several months later.
