Officer Fired for the Third Time
Police Misconduct Leads to 3rd Termination
(GA) – A Clayton County Sheriff’s Office officer, Gregory Hubert Brown, was fired after an investigation into an incident that resulted in accusations of racism made by inmates and fellow officers. According to VICE.com,
“Officer Gregory Hubert Brown, a corrections officer at the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office, called a prisoner on suicide watch a “crazy” N-word, according to a colleague and other inmates who were nearby.”
While the Clayton County Sheriff’f Office can be commended for their quick action in immediately placing Brown on leave and eventually firing him, that he was employed with the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office in the first place raises a lot of questions.
Bad Management at Sheriff’s Office
Before Brown was hired by the Clayton County S.O., he had worked at the Coweta County Prison. While there, he got into an argument with another officer that led to Brown being fired. The officer told Brown he needed to document Brown’s head count checks. Brown got angry at his poor job performance being commented on and became aggressive with the officer. “Records say that Brown replied by threatening the officer with physical violence before pushing him with his chest.”
Brown had a problem history before the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office even hired him and they knew it, but it gets worse, They did hire him and were forced to fire him. According to VICE.com,
“…he was promptly fired in March 2012 for negligently locking his fellow officers in cells with other inmates on at least three different occasions while working in the jail’s control room. Records also show that during this stint, Brown tried to open at least two different cell doors without authorization from a higher-up and used an emergency override to open another section of cells without proper justification, according to the Atlantic Journal-Constitution.”
Sheriff’s Office Completely Disregards Workplace Morale and Safety
Gregory Brown’s actions were unbelievably dangerous. I know the article says Brown’s actions were negligent but I don’t believe it. This man was deliberately locking his co-workers in with inmates. We can only assume that he was intending for them to get hurt. He also went so far as to use an emergency override to try to let dangerous inmates out of their cells. Again, we can only assume that his intent was for the officers in the area to be attacked. This is why I say his actions in locking officers in with inmates were intentional. By releasing inmates, he was showing his willingness to place officers in danger and there is no way to say that was accidental. I can see where they would not be able to definitively prove that locking the officers in with inmates was intentional, without a witness, but I suspect the investigators know that it was.
Can you imagine how the officers must have felt when the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office rehired Gregory Hubert Brown? Not just the ones that had been previously targeted by Brown but all officers. They would all know that they would be in danger if Brown decided he didn’t like them.
Workplace morale must have plummeted when it became obvious that the administration at the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office didn’t care about the danger that Gregory Brown placed other officers in. This was literally an abuse of power, by Brown, with the intent to harm others. And they rehired him? The agency has not released any information as to why they rehired a man with such a troubling history, but I have to wonder if the good old boy system, that tends to favor White men, was a work.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when you have to be grateful that all that happened this time was Brown making racist comments. With this man, it could have been so much worse. Hopefully, he will not get hired by another law enforcement agency.