Dover police officer not guilty, future unclear

The white Dover police officer who was criminally charged with assault after kicking a black man in the head during an arrest in 2013 walked out the back door of the Kent County Courthouse a free man, leaving in his wake a still-divided community.

The case against Dover Cpl. Thomas Webster IV, who was charged in May with felony assault, had represented in Delaware the growing nationwide tension over the relationship between police and the black communities they work in. That tension has engulfed the country following several high profile cases where young black men were killed by police officers.

Although this was not a case that ended in a fatality, Superior Court Judge Ferris Wharton noted at the end of the trial the potential that "tensions could have run high" during the proceedings. The reading of the verdict was greeted by silence.

A police car dashcam recorded Webster kicking 29-year-old Lateef Dickerson in the head – knocking him out and fracturing his jaw – on a Saturday night in August of 2013 after Dickerson had run from another officer who was breaking up a fight.

"It's an injustice," said Mary Fleming, of Dover, after the verdict came down on Tuesday afternoon. "We don't even kick our dogs in the face. We treat our dogs better."

She was among the dozen or so people who spilled out onto the courthouse steps following the verdict, expressing emotions from discontent to anger.

Fred Calhoun, president of the Delaware Fraternal Order of Police, praised the verdict, saying that it would “go a long way with my brothers and sisters” to make them feel supported. There are 2,600 officers in the FOP, he said, and this verdict “sends a clear message to society that the need for law enforcement is not lost.”

Those two contrasting views sum up the long-simmering divide that has been amplified since a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in the summer of 2014.

Other incidents have kept the debate and the Black Lives Matter movement growing. A trial for one of six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray earlier this year in Baltimore started on the same day as Webster's.

And on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would investigate the Chicago Police Department's use of force following the recent release of a video showing an officer shooting a young black man 16 times.

The 12 member jury that decided the Webster case – nine women, two of whom were black, and three men, one of whom was Asian – handed down their verdict on Tuesday just before 3 p.m., after hearing five days of testimony. They started deliberating on Friday.

Webster’s defense attorney, James Liguori, called it a “thoughtful verdict.” He had leveled a defense that Webster’s use of force was justified in order to get a suspect into custody.

Webster, 42, has worked for the Dover Police Department for 10 years. He’s been suspended since he was indicted in May. Now that he has been acquitted, the department will "evaluate the details of the case" over the next several days and decide whether Webster will return to work, according to a statement from Mark Hoffman, spokesman for the department, on behalf of chief Paul Bernat.

Webster generated 29 use-of-force reports as a Dover police officer, according to court papers filed by the prosecution and unsealed last month. The state Attorney General's Office initially wanted to use four examples from it in the trial, but didn’t end up using any.

The fourth of those examples was the reason Webster was on disciplinary probation in August 2013, when the dashcam video was taken showing him kicking Dickerson.

Several months earlier, Webster and another officer had taken two drunken suspects from a 7-Eleven in Dover to a rural area near a wildlife refuge by Little Creek and left them there, even though one of them had asked to be taken to a hospital, according to court papers filed by the prosecution. Webster was suspended for 10 days and put on nine-month disciplinary probation.

The charge brought against Webster is among the most common to be lodged against police officers, said Philip Stinson, a criminology professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who has amassed data on officer arrests.

According to his data, one in five cases brought against police officers are for assault, either felony or misdemeanor and including both on-duty and off-duty incidents.

But, he says those numbers might be skewed since, "most cops don't get arrested."

For charges brought against officers for on-duty incidents alone, like in the case against Webster, there were 2,791 between 2005 and 2011, he said. Six percent were for felony assault charges and 12 percent were for misdemeanor assault.

"These on-duty assaults, like this one, it's very difficult to get a guilty verdict," Stinson said.

It's not yet clear what kind of effect Ferguson and the debate that followed it will have on jury verdicts since most of the cases are still working their way through the system, Stinson said.

If it will change the tendency of juries to acquit officers, that change will be slow in coming, said Barry Dyller, a civil rights attorney in Pennsylvania who handles police brutality cases.

Right now, he said, “juries still want to find for police.”

As for the reason, “My take is that Trump is leading in the polls and that tells me something about the mood of citizens,” Dyller said, referring to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who said this week that the United States should close its doors to Muslims until the threat of terrorism has diminished.

Next steps are critical

Webster was charged with felony assault in May, almost two years after the incident was captured on video. Attorney General Matt Denn, who had just taken office in January, had decided to present the case to a second grand jury in order to get the indictment since the first one to consider it a year earlier did not file charges against him.

Liguori criticized Denn, calling his decision to seek an indictment the second time politically motivated, since it followed the tension in Ferguson.

"We live in difficult times," Liguori told the jury at one point.

He declined to comment on that issue after the trial, but the state prosecutor who tried the case, Mark Denney, said, "The new attorney general was entitled to have his shot at it."

This wasn’t the only case to come out of the 2013 incident – Dickerson also filed a civil suit in federal court, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, that has been recently resolved, according to Kathleen MacRae, executive director for the Delaware ACLU. The terms of that settlement won’t become public until the judge gives it final approval.

Following Tuesday’s verdict, MacRae called on the state to set up an independent civilian oversight mechanism for law enforcement.

“The police must not be allowed to violate the civil rights of Delawareans with impunity,” she said in a prepared statement, calling the Webster case “a perfect example” of why police oversight is necessary.

La Mar Gunn, president of the Central Delaware NAACP who was at the trial every day, said that he is working on strategic plans to continue working toward "some real change." Black dollars and black votes matter, he said.

The jury must have thought long and hard about the verdict, said Lacey Lafferty, a GOP candidate for governor and a retired Delaware State Trooper.

“I saw the videotape – a lot of people did – and I clearly would have had problems with what I saw,” she said. “I don’t see why he needed to throw a kick in the man’s direction.”

Delaware state officials will have to tread carefully, she said, since, “people are upset, and, some of them, justifiably so.”

Of the Dover Police Department’s 94 officers, the vast majority, 78 of them, are white, at last count. There are 12 black officers on the force, according to a racial breakdown provided by police in May.

About 10 new officers have been added to the ranks since those statistics were provided. The current makeup is unavailable.

News Journal reporters Jon Offredo and Jonathan Starkey contributed to this story.

Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909, sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.