A new report criticized the actions D.C. police took before and after the death of Karon Hylton-Brown, who died after a police chase in 2020, and found that the settlements for the convicted officers who later received a presidential pardon were “extremely lenient.”
The report by the Office of the D.C. Auditor showed that D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith blocked the firing of two officers who were convicted in the deadly chase and quietly gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay after they were pardoned by President Donald Trump soon after he took office in January.
“These two officers should be fired. They should be terminated, and the police chief decided not to,” D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson told WTOP’s Valerie Bonk. “The police chief did not follow the recommendations of our own internal review. It’s disquieting. It’s concerning.”
Patterson said the final case study in the traffic death of Hylton-Brown recommended that police officer Terence Sutton and Lt. Andrew Zabavsky should have been fired for misconduct.
The officers were found guilty of federal crimes after the deadly chase.
“We don’t have an explanation yet from Chief Smith on why the sustained findings in this report and the following recommendations for termination, why those were not followed,” Patterson said.
She said she wants to see someone step in and make sure changes happen.
“The D.C. Council may want to concern itself with these issues, and I’m certainly hoping they do some oversight on these issues, because we don’t have an explanation yet from Chief Smith,” Patterson said.
Sutton pursued Hylton-Brown, who was 20 years old and riding a rental scooter without a helmet on a sidewalk, for about 10 minutes. According to the Justice Department, the officer followed Hylton-Brown down a narrow alleyway and sped up behind him without his lights or sirens on.
Hylton-Brown turned out onto a street and was struck by an uninvolved driver. He died in a hospital two days later.
Zabavsky, Sutton’s supervisor, is accused of covering it up. Sutton was given 25 days suspension and Zabavsky was permitted to retire after paying a fine.
In response to the report, the D.C. Police Union said it is a politically motivated, baseless attack on the integrity of D.C. police officers.
The union said the audit “perpetuates a pattern of anti-police bias.”
In a separate, 17-page response to the audit, the Metropolitan Police Department said the “Terry stop” that was conducted was warranted as Hylton-Brown had an “extensive and violent criminal history” and violated traffic laws as officers pursued him.
WTOP requested an interview with Smith but was referred to her response in the report.
She said that she rejects the recommendations of the audit and said that the officers’ actions on the scene and afterward complied with D.C. police policy and were not criminal.
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