Fired Fort Worth police officers sue city for discrimination

Two former police officers who were fired because they were implicated in a scheme to illegally collect overtime pay while writing tickets in a federally funded grant program have filed a lawsuit claiming they were retaliated against.

The retaliation came because they complained about discrimination in the Fort Worth Police Department, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court.

James Dunn and Maurice Middleton were two of 10 officers implicated in the overtime scandal. Investigators alleged that officers were writing tickets in the program during times they did not work. Most of those officers were then indicted on state charges of tampering with a governmental record and theft by a public servant.

Dunn and Middleton, who are African-American, claim in their lawsuit that officers of different races charged with similar offenses were treated differently.

Dunn and Middleton said they were targeted for investigation only after they said they were offended by a picture of a police sergeant holding a noose around a snowman’s neck that was wearing a police cap on its head and holding a banana in its hand that they saw in July 2010.

The officers named the city and retired Police Chief Jeff Halstead as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, Dunn and Middleton complained to their supervisors about the snowman picture but the supervisors did little or nothing about it.

Sometime after that, the investigation into the illegal overtime ticket writing scandal began, the lawsuit states.

One officer who was implicated in the scandal, Patrick Aguilar, was never charged after agreeing to relinquish his peace officers license. Charges against eight of the officers were dismissed in January 2014, when prosecutors said new information had “been revealed that affected the viability of the prosecution.”

A month later, the Police Department fired Tahwana Zavala, who some attorneys have alleged was protected by a supervisor during the initial investigation. The Tarrant County district attorney’s office said Zavala would not face state charges because the statute of limitations had run out.

In December, the outgoing Halstead, in an interview with the Star-Telegram, blamed the charges’ dismissal on the “significant delay” in the prosecution’s movement of the cases.

Prosecutor Dave Lobingier, who has since retired from the district attorney’s office, disputed the chief’s claim and revealed that the charges had been dismissed because evidence showed that the city was using an illegal quota system, which is also mentioned in the lawsuit.

After state charges were dropped, federal investigators, who had also been asked to look into the ticket writing scandal, threatened to bring charges against the some of the officers named in the investigation.

Most of those officers agreed to relinquish their peace officers licenses and end the threat of federal charges. Dunn and Middleton were the only two who refused to surrender their licenses.

This report includes material from the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published July 31, 2015 at 9:43 PM with the headline "Fired Fort Worth police officers sue city for discrimination."