San Antonio Cop Fired For Giving Homeless Person An Actual Shit Sandwich
Soon after his return to the San Antonio Police Department's top post last year, Chief William McManus set up a homeless outreach team inside SAPD whose primary job would be to connect the city's downtrodden with things like social services, temporary housing, and drug treatment. The main problem the team encountered during its first six months, however, was that homeless people didn't seem to trust the police, with nearly half refusing any help (it probably didn't help that officers wound up detaining some 17 percent of people they encountered during those homeless outreach stops).
The problem is years of built-up acrimony between the city's homeless population and police force, according to Joan Cheever, who herself has been on the wrong side of the city's sustained attempt to arrest and fine homelessness out of existence in San Antonio. Cheever was the subject of international headlines last year when San Antonio police handed her a $2,000 fine for feeding homeless people out of her Chow Train food truck at Maverick Park (the city later dismissed the citation after Cheever threatened a federal lawsuit, she says). Since then, Cheever says, SAPD has been trying to build bridges between police and members of the local homeless community.
Then came the news on Friday that a San Antonio cop had been fired for trying to feed a homeless person an actual shit sandwich – as in feces smashed between a slide of bread. After the Express-News first reported the incident (City Council members were reportedly briefed in a closed-door session Thursday), SAPD officials identified the officer as Matthew Luckhurst, a five-year veteran of the department who'd been assigned to downtown bike patrol for the past year. The incident came to light, according to SAPD officials, because Luckhurst had bragged to a fellow officer "that he had picked up some feces, placed it in a slice of bread, and put it in a Styrofoam container" next to an unknown homeless man. The other officer told Luckhurst to go back and throw it away, which he assumed he did, according to an SAPD statement. Another officer reported Luckhurst's actions to his supervisor, which led to the internal affairs investigation that resulted in his firing.
City officials up and down the ladder quickly expressed outrage. “Firing this officer was the right thing to do," Mayor Ivy Taylor said in a prepared statement. "His actions were a betrayal of every value we have in our community, and he is not representative of our great police force.” In a statement, Chief McManus called Luckhurst's actions "vile and disgusting," but said the fact that his fellow officers came forward with the story "demonstrates that this type of behavior will never be tolerated."
Read more: http://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2016/11/04/san-antonio-cop-fired-for-giving-homeless-person-an-actual-shit-sandwich
= new reply since forum marked as read
