Why is it that any time you happen upon a story about the kind of people you WANT to be a police officer it involves them being fired?


Stephen Mader, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, settled a wrongful termination suit against the Weirton, West Virginia, police department for $175,000. He alleged that the department fired him for not shooting a black man struggling with suicide.

“At the end of the day, I’m happy to put this chapter of my life to bed,” said Stephen Mader, a former officer in Weirton, West Virginia, who was also granted a pledge that his former employer would not prevent him from obtaining a new job in law enforcement elsewhere.

Mader was the first responding officer to a 2016 call involving RJ Williams, a 23-year-old black man believed to be suicidal. Mader, who is white, made the determination that Williams did not pose an immediate threat to him or fellow officers, even though he was holding a gun. Mader began trying to talk Williams down.

“He wasn’t angry,” Mader previously told the Guardian. “He wasn’t aggressive, he didn’t seem in position to want to use a gun against anybody. He never pointed it at me. I didn’t perceive him as an imminent threat.”

But amid Mader’s attempts to convince Williams to drop the weapon, two veteran officers arrived on the scene and, almost immediately, shot and killed Williams.

Mader, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, received a termination letter 10 days later, which claimed that he failed to respond to the threat. “The unfortunate reality of police work is that making any decision is better than making no decision at all,” it read.

Mader disagreed and filed a suit alleging wrongful termination. “No police officer should ever lose their job – or have their name dragged through the mud – for choosing to talk to, rather than shoot a fellow citizen,” Mader’s attorney Timothy O’Brien said after the settlement.


Source: https://marpheenchann.com/2018/02/12...n-wins-175000/