Georgia Cops Who Brutalized Black Man Resign

Here’s a question: Why are cops who have committed egregious acts of misconduct, including but not limited to beating Black people while they’re restrained and helpless, allowed by their departments to resign before they get fired? It’s bad enough that they pretty much have to kill a person on camera before they’re held criminally accountable (and sometimes not even then), but when police departments go out of their way to protect the professional reputations of racist, violent or otherwise misbehaving police officers by allowing them to turn in their resignations instead of simply being terminated, it becomes abundantly clear that the entire system of policing is designed around protecting cops first and everyone else (maybe) second.

Last August, two police officers in Cobb County, Georgia, Nicholas Malagon and Noah Maack, were captured in body camera footage that showed one of the officers repeatedly punching a Black man, Montavious Smith, who was unarmed, on the ground and visibly trying to comply with police orders during his arrest near a Six Flags Over Georgia parking lot, according to WSB-TV 2. The footage was discovered when a supervisor was spot-checking body camera video last year, according to Cobb Public Safety Director Mike Register, and the two officers were all set to be fired. However, this week, it was revealed that they will now resign instead of being terminated.

Mind you, the description of the altercation in the official police report described the handling of Smith much differently than what the video footage shows, which is a reminder that there’s no reason a police officer’s account of anything should automatically be treated as gospel.

From WSB-TV:

An incident report suggested that the officers “tackled” the suspect to the ground, but Internal Affairs Commander Damon Ballard says nothing on the body camera from the incident supports that claim.

“Why did y’all punch me?” Smith can be heard asking on the body camera footage.

“Because you didn’t listen,” officers responded.

Ballard says that officers were responding to reports of two pairs of people pointing guns at each other near a Six Flags Over Georgia parking lot.

He says the video shows officers punching Smith, but that Smith was not resisting them. Ballard goes on to say that this is against department policy.

“The chief made the decision to terminate and great decision,” Register told Winne.

Cobb County Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer says he terminated Malagon for unreasonable use of force and other policy violations. Maack was fired for making false statements in his incident report, including saying that Smith was tackled.

Yes, it was a “great decision” to fire the officers, or at least the next best thing to a “great decision,” which would be charging them with assault and for making false statements, both of which would be arrestable offenses if they were committed by civilians. Not that any of that matters, since the decision to fire them also didn’t take as it was reported this week that both officers were allowed to resign in lieu of being fired, which, by the way, is far from uncommon.

On Thursday, we reported that former Michigan police officer Greg Marohn was allowed to resign before he was fired for buying drugs illegally while on duty and for hurling racial slurs at a random Black woman he happened to pass by while in his patrol car, which recorded the slurs and a phone call he made to his dealer. Marohn even admitted that he had bought drugs while on duty at least 10 times in the past. Care to guess what happened after he resigned from that job? He was re-hired by another police department in the same state, and he was allowed to resign from that job after he continued to show signs of drug use, which he admitted to again.

This is what Black people mean when we say it’s about more than “a few bad apples.” The entire system of policing is the problem, so let’s start there.