They watched a woman call police on a Black man for carefully selecting groceries and looking too muscular while doing it. The store manager was shown the footage that afternoon. He watched his employee call police on a customer who had done absolutely nothing wrong. He called Cassie into his office the same day and terminated her employment effective immediately, telling her that what she had done was not only wrong, but had exposed the store to serious legal liability and had contributed directly to an innocent man being assaulted on his premises. Cassie tried to argue that she had genuinely felt uncomfortable.
The manager told her that feeling uncomfortable because a Black man was large and taking his time shopping was not a reason to call police and that her discomfort did not justify what followed. She collected her belongings and left the building knowing that her face and her phone call were now part of footage that 30 million people had seen. Mallerie's suspension became the least of his problems when the criminal charges arrived three days later. Assault, filing a false police report, and civil rights violations under color of law. Pierce filed a federal civil rights lawsuit the same week.
And when Pierce's attorney requested Mallerie's full personnel file as part of the discovery process, what came back made the assault in the grocery store look like the end of a very long story rather than a single isolated incident. Mallerie's personnel file arrived at Pierce's attorney's office in a sealed folder containing 20 years of documented complaints, internal reviews, disciplinary records, and supervisor signoffs. The attorney opened it and spent two hours reading it cover to cover. When she finished, she sat back in her chair and said one thing to her paralegal. "He should have been fired in 2011."
28 complaints had been filed against Eric Mallerie during his 20-year career. 23 of them came from Black or Hispanic residents. 16 were excessive force complaints. 11 were wrongful detention complaints. In 2011, a formal review board had recommended that Mallerie be terminated after a particularly serious excessive force complaint involving a Black man who had been hospitalized following a traffic stop.
The recommendation was overruled by a senior supervisor who described Mallerie as a valuable officer with strong community instincts. That supervisor had since retired with full benefits. The Black man who was hospitalized had received a small, quiet settlement and signed a non-disclosure agreement that had kept the incident buried for 13 years. There were four other incidents in Mallerie's file where his written reports had been contradicted by witness accounts or partial footage. In each case, the department had sided with Mallerie, dismissed the complaint, and closed the file.
Nobody had ever sat all 28 complaints side by side and looked at the pattern they formed together. When Pierce's attorney did exactly that and presented the findings to the federal prosecutor handling the criminal case, the prosecutor described it as one of the clearest documented cases of institutional protection