KPD Lt. Travis Brasfield resigned Monday, saying he's suffered retaliation for misconduct complaint.

Brasfield was reassigned to the chief's office after he filed his complaint.

He says he was put in a small, windowless office and given busy work.

Brasfield also says he thinks commanders were trying to gather information to set up his dismissal.

The Knoxville Police Department lieutenant whose complaint kicked off a wide-ranging internal investigation resigned Monday, saying he was harassed and retaliated against.

Travis Brasfield submitted his resignation to the City of Knoxville Civil Service, just days after he filed a grievance with the office, said his attorney, John Valliant. The actions taken against him, Brasfield asserts, will discourage other department employees from reporting inappropriate or criminal behavior.

Brasfield wrote one of two complaints filed with the department's internal affairs unit related to the conduct of Sgt. Bob Maxwell, who was shown in a video drawing an image on a whiteboard during roll call of a woman performing oral sex on a man and saying, "You force her to do what's called a 'chokejob.' " The other complaint was anonymously submitted.

Maxwell retired only after Brasfield, his direct supervisor, filed a complaint asserting that top commanders were sweeping concerns about Maxwell under the rug.

In his complaint, Brasfield described attempts by Deputy Chief Kenny Miller, who oversaw Internal Affairs from 2010-15, and Capt. Tony Willis, who oversees half the city's patrol force as commander of the East District, to avoid documenting Maxwell's behavior.

Brasfield, who is a member of the Tennessee Bar Association and a licensed lawyer, will not retire with a full pension because he is not eligible for complete benefits unless he works until he turns 50 in about seven years.

Maxwell, on the other hand, retired after Brasfield filed his complaint and will be paid nearly $4,000 a month for life from the pension he earned in more than 26 years of service.

Menial work under close supervision

Brasfield says in his grievance that Police Chief Eve Thomas personally reassigned him to desk duty — he was told to check departmental policies to make sure they conformed with new state statutes — because he was in an “explosive situation.”

He says the chief told him she knew he felt “like a man on an island, and that she was putting me further out on the island,” but it was the best she could come up with.

The assignment occurred July 18, the same day Thomas and Mayor Madeline Rogero addressed the media about the complaint.

Brasfield said he was promised but was not given a laptop to do this work, so he instead used the department-issued tablet he still had in his possession after the reassignment.

He said the transfer punished him with “solitude and fruitless labor in an isolated conference room with no windows.”

Further, Brasfield said he thinks his email was being monitored in real time by superiors who were trying to catch him doing anything that could result in disciplinary action.

He wrote his proximity to the chief and the email surveillance, along with the menial task, was a sham and stall tactic so he could be surveyed and department officials could begin gathering data to use against him in retaliation for filing the complaint against Miller and Willis.

Additionally, Brasfield said in his grievance that in his meetings with internal affairs, investigators wanted to talk about who filed the anonymous complaint and recorded the video of Maxwell, not the content of his complaint.

His next scheduled meeting to discuss the content of his complaint — that KPD commanders covered up bad behavior — wasn’t scheduled until Aug. 6.

Recordings show instances of misconduct

Knox News has reviewed recordings of Maxwell and Willis meeting with an officer who admitted to having sex with an emergency dispatch employee whose husband had complained about the affair, but not disciplining the officer.

Willis later said in that meeting after the officer left that "estrogen poisons and destroys the logic center of the brain. All reason is abolished. It's gone. This is science, not speculation."

Also in the meeting with Willis, Brasfield and Maxwell, the three discussed an incident captured on video in which a woman claimed that an officer extorted oral sex from her in exchange for not citing her after he found marijuana on her during a suspected DUI stop.

The woman later denied any sort of sexual act took place, but Willis said he didn't believe her retraction.

Chief Thomas said at the July 18 news conference that she’s never seen evidence to suggest there’s a pattern of disciplinary actions not being placed in personnel records even as Knox News reporting showed top commanders not taking disciplinary action, including when officers admitted to misconduct.

Thomas described her reaction when she learned of the allegations after the initial complaint was filed. "I was stunned. I was horrified. I was deeply embarrassed. And I was hurt," she said during the press conference.

The chief said she doesn't believe there is a problem with the police department's culture.

“I need to make it clear that this is not indicative of the men and women who proudly serve this community every day,” she said. “I don’t want people to think it is and we’re hiding behind it.”

Furthermore, the department has documented two disciplinary actions against its personnel for sexual misconduct in the past 10 years, according to a review of department documents by Knox News, including one in which a police officer sent an unsolicited photo of his genitals to a co-worker.

Laurie Woods, a career law enforcement officer and Vanderbilt University sociology professor who reviewed Knox News' findings, said the figure is so low that she doubts the department is properly documenting complaints.

“Perhaps they’ve just had (two) formal complaints that have come to the point of being documented, but I would imagine there have been many, many complaints that were handled informally as those things unfortunately normally are,” Woods said.

No one has been disciplined so far in the investigation and every officer mentioned in the complaint remains on active duty and has not been reassigned, according to a KPD spokesman.