Blayne Williams is an officer with the Austin Police Department.
Officer Williams has what might be called a “colorful” history. He was fired in October of 2013 after an incident at a local hotel. Last November, the arbitrator overturned Williams’ firing, reducing it to a 15-day suspension.
Previously, in 2011, Officer Williams was suspended for 90 days after he got into a physical altercation with an HEB employee while he was off duty. He was also charged with “assault on an elderly person”, but that charge was dismissed “and eventually wiped from his record after he completed probation and had the charge expunged”.
The hook now is that Officer Williams is suing. Why? He claims the police department “wrongly passed him up for promotion”. Yes, I kid you not: a guy who has been suspended twice in four years and was almost fired is claiming he should have been promoted to either corporal or detective.
Oh, by the way: in addition to his suit against the city, Officer Williams already has a lawsuit pending in federal court, claiming his firing over the cellphone incident was in retaliation for discrimination claims he’d filed previously.
Hand to God, people, I don’t make this stuff up.
I don’t have a bit of use for Chief Hollywood; he’s nothing but an illegal-alien loving gun-confiscating camera-loving lapdog of liberals. Having said that, however, it must be hell to try and run a police department when an arbitrator can reverse your decision at a seeming whim.
I agree with you on both points, roadgeek, especially the first.
I do feel a slight quibble, though, and this may just be me.
Is the arbitrator reversing decisions on a whim, or because of internal APD politics? Because of pressure from the rank and file, and the police union?
Or is the arbitrator reversing decisions because the chief and his minions keep screwing up disciplinary actions? You’d think after the first couple of revisals, they’d be going through and nailing these things down so hard that not even light can escape from the cases they present. Then again, stranger things have happened.
One of these days, I’d really like to dig deeper into this and do a post answering that question: union pressure or incompetence? That’ll probably once I get everything else off my plate, sometime in the year 2525.
[…] may recall Blayne Williams, the APD officer who was suing the department for not promoting him, even though he’d been […]