That's their job. My job right now is to make sure this is handled properly and completely." Both officers surrendered their badges and weapons that morning and left the building in plain clothes. Word moved through the department quickly the way it always does when something significant happens on a chief's first day. And by mid-morning every officer in the building knew that the new chief had arrived to find two of their colleagues suspended for trying to arrest him on Saturday while he was moving into his own home.
Internal Affairs opened the investigation the same day and pulled both officers' personnel files. What they found in those files is what turned a story about one Saturday morning into something much larger. Whitaker had been on the force for fifteen years and had accumulated eleven racial profiling complaints during that time. Nine of those complaints came from black residents who described being stopped, questioned, or detained without cause in situations where their documentation or explanation was dismissed in favor of a white person's account. All eleven complaints had been investigated internally and closed without meaningful discipline.
Three of them had notes from reviewing supervisors describing Whitaker as a thorough and dedicated officer whose instincts had served the department well. Barrett had been on the force for three years and already had seven complaints in his file. Six came from minorities. Three described situations remarkably similar to what happened in the Westbrook Apartments hallway. Barrett following a senior officer's lead in dismissing valid documentation from a black person while accepting a white person's contradicting account without question.
Barrett's complaints had been closed with even less scrutiny than Whitaker's, largely because he was junior and the complaints were attributed to his inexperience rather than his bias. But the investigation didn't stop with the officers. Rivers had instructed Internal Affairs to pull everything connected to the Saturday incident, including the building's full security history. And when investigators reviewed two years of Westbrook Apartments camera footage, they found a pattern that made the investigation significantly larger than two officers with bad complaint histories. Deborah Lane appeared in the footage 114 times over two years.
Forty-one of those appearances showed her in hallways or near the elevator in situations that had nothing to do with her own movements through the building. She was watching people. Specifically, she was watching black residents, following their movements with her eyes, positioning herself near the entrance when she saw them arrive, and in twelve documented instances, she was shown on camera reaching for her phone immediately after a black resident passed her in the hallway. The building management company was contacted and pulled their complaint records at Internal Affairs' request. Lane had filed twenty-three formal complaints over twelve years. nineteen of them were against black residents.
The complaints ranged from noise violations to claims of suspicious behavior to allegations of property damage, none of which had been substantiated on investigation. Three black tenants had moved out of Westbrook Apartments within six months of sustained complaint campaigns by Lane, and two of them had left reviews on apartment listing websites mentioning a hostile neighbor who made them feel unwelcome and unsafe in their own home. Internal Affairs contacted all three former tenants. Two agreed to speak. The first was a black woman who had lived in apartment 4B directly next to Lane's apartment for eight months before leaving.