The footage showed Simmons making his decision based on nothing more than what he saw a Black man and a white child, and then moving toward them with a conclusion already formed. The audio captured Lily saying, "That's my daddy," clearly enough that there was no room for any interpretation other than the obvious one. It captured her saying it a second time and a third time, and it captured Simmons each time turning his attention back to Reggie as though the child had not spoken. It captured Simmons telling Lily she was only crying because she was scared of what Reggie would do to her if she told the truth, and it captured Reggie's response that she was crying because Simmons had just handcuffed her father in front of her. Every word.
Every moment. All of it documented in sequence on Simmons' own equipment. The investigator pulled Simmons' personnel file and found three prior complaints filed over the previous four years. The first had come from a Black man who had been stopped in the same park while walking with a white child who turned out to be his nephew. The second had come from a Black father at a public swimming pool who Simmons had questioned about his relationship to a white child who was his biological daughter from a previous relationship.
The third had come from a Black man at a grocery store who Simmons had approached after seeing him push a shopping cart containing a white toddler. All three complaints described the same behavior. All three had been investigated and dismissed with verbal warnings. All three had been filed and forgotten, and Simmons had continued patrolling with the knowledge that the pattern cost him nothing. The Internal Affairs report was completed 12 days after Diana filed her complaint, and its findings were submitted to the police chief with a single recommendation.
Termination. The report stated that Simmons had conducted a stop without legal justification, had ignored repeated credible statements from both the child and the father, had made a decision to remove a child from her parent without probable cause, had told the child that her own father was a threat to her safety without any evidence to support that claim, and had demonstrated a documented pattern of targeting Black men in situations involving children of different racial backgrounds. The pattern had been identified in prior complaints and had not been addressed, and the institution's failure to act on those complaints had allowed the behavior to continue until it resulted in the handcuffing of an innocent man in front of his five-year-old daughter. The federal civil rights lawsuit that Diana and Reggie filed named Simmons personally and the city for enabling the pattern through its failure to act on prior complaints. The charges included false arrest, racial profiling, emotional distress inflicted on both Reggie and Lily, and violation of the family's civil rights under federal law.