This story was updated in March 2020 to remove an identity under cleveland.com’s Right to be Forgotten policy.

Cleveland police officer Valerie Thompson was arrested on felony charges Friday after an internal investigation showed she ordered the deletion of video recordings of a bouncer assaulting a customer at the West Park Station where Thompson worked off-duty security, records say.

(Cory Shaffer, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- An off-duty Cleveland police officer working security at a popular West Park bar ordered someone to delete video footage that showed a bouncer punch a customer, and later filed a false police report accusing the customer in the attack, according to court records.

Valerie Thompson, a 22-year department veteran, was charged Friday with felony obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence after a weeks-long investigation by the Cleveland police Internal Affairs Unit into the April 2 scuffle at West Park Station.

Thompson wrote in a police report that the bouncer was asking customers to finish up at the bar about 2 a.m. When the bouncer got to one patron, the patron turned and punched the bouncer “without provocation,” Thompson wrote.

First District detectives later obtained an arrest warrant charging that patron with felonious assault.

But video recordings would have showed that the patron was assaulted, had Thompson not deleted them, according to an affidavit filed Friday by internal investigators and obtained by cleveland.com.

Thompson concealed and ordered the destruction of a video recording of the felonious assault of the patron, the affidavit says. She then filed a false police report of the incident that left out evidence pertinent to the investigation, the affidavit says.

The affidavit does not say who Thompson ordered to delete the video.

An investigator in the Internal Affairs Unit filed the affidavit after interviewing witnesses and viewing surveillance footage from the bar.

The bar's co-manager, Jason Salupo, told cleveland.com April 12 that the attack happened at a spot inside the bar that was not covered by working security cameras.

City prosecutors withdrew the arrest warrant against the patron last week, according to court records.

The Cleveland police department announced Thompson's arrest in a late Friday news release, saying only that the charges were related to an incident in which she was off-duty working secondary employment.

Thompson was suspended without pay Friday until her criminal case ends.

A Cleveland Municipal Court Judge set Thompson's bond at $5,000 by phone immediately after she turned herself in, records show. She posted 10 percent of her bond and was released.

She is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.

sTh you’d like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.is