After more than a year of protests in a small north Alabama city over the fatal police shooting of a Black man outside his home, a redacted and highly anticipated third-party investigation found that the local police department often made improper arrests and failed to thoroughly investigate civilian complaints, the Associated Press reports. The 43-page report published Thursday finds that members of the Decatur Police Department “often” unnecessarily charged citizens with disorderly conduct and obstruction of governmental operations, and failed to thoroughly investigate civilian complaints — including use of force incidents. Decatur has a population of approximately 60,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and is located about 30 miles from Huntsville, Alabama. The report notes numerous occasions when officers “improperly” arrested someone for disorderly conduct “and described the facts of the arrest differently in their arrest report compared with what was observed” in body-camera footage. On other occasions, officers arrested citizens for simply using profanity, the report notes. “DPD should provide additional training to sworn personnel regarding free speech to ensure that citizens’ rights are not infringed upon,” the report recommends.
The Decatur City Council unanimously voted to hire Green Research and Technology to conduct an independent third-party review of the department after the fatal shooting of a Black man outside his own home in 2023 sparked frequent protests across the city. The investigation included a review of two years’ worth of citizen complaints about the department, over 300 hours of body-worn camera footage, and over 100 interviews with both members of the Decatur community and police department personnel. The third-party investigation was limited by a fragmented system for handling civilian complaints, with poor documentation, failures to activate body-worn cameras, and videos that were misfiled and deleted. Decatur Police Chief Todd Pinion defended his department in a press conference on Thursday just hours after he reviewed the report for the first time. “There are situations where we could have made better decisions. I believe these are isolated incidents and not a reflection of the overall conduct of our officers or this department,” Pinion said.
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