When The Blue Line Frays with Deputy Chief Arthur Myers

Arthur Myers 0:00

I went from being a lieutenant, responding to stuff every day, to nothing. Literally nothing. And it was it was just a total shock. You're like, one day you're a police officer, you're a commander, you're doing your job, and next day you're sitting at home wondering, why is my career over? What's going on here? Devastating doesn't really cover it.

Welcome, Sponsor, And Guest Setup

Announcement 0:21

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice, and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Travis Yates 0:32

Well, welcome back to the show. We're so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today. And today's guest is someone that needs to be heard. You need to spread the message, and I can't wait for you to hear from him. Before we get started, remember our sponsor is Telegenics. They are offering a 37% discount to first responders and their spouses for health and wellness. The link will be in the show notes, but I've met the owners, they're the real deal, and you should definitely check them out. Well, it's our honor to welcome on the show today Deputy Chief of Police Arthur Myers. He's a 31-year law enforcement veteran. He's the author of the book, Tattered Win the Blue Line Phrase. And I've got to tell you, I read this book this week, and this thing will rock you to the core. You need to get a copy of this book. The only thing that I couldn't believe when I was reading it is that someone had the guts to actually write it, and we have that someone on the shoulder day. Uh, Chief Myers, how are you doing, sir?

Arthur Myers 1:38

Doing very well, Travis. How are you, sir?

Travis Yates 1:40

Well, I can't thank you enough for being on the show. Uh, it took a lot of courage to put what you did on paper down. It takes a lot of courage to talk about it publicly. I just kind of want to get right straight into it very quickly before we get to the incident, because the book is about an incident. It's an incident that is not uncommon in law enforcement, but the story is uncommon. Most people do not talk about these types of incidents. And so it's certainly an honor to have you. But before we get to the incident, take us through your career to that day, because on that day you were Lieutenant Arthur Myers. And so kind of walk us through to that day, and then we'll go from

The Career Path To Lieutenant

Travis Yates 2:16

there.

Arthur Myers 2:16

So I started Patrol State Police Department a long time ago. And I served through the ranks there um for 23 years and had been everything from an interdiction patrol sergeant, patrol sergeant, corporal, and then finally I was a lieutenant. I commanded a couple of teams while I was a lieutenant. Then I went to the training office for five years and basically taught the entire department and had a lot of uh I called it a legacy position. It was a chance to kind of leave my hand on what we were teaching them. And then we got a new chief, and then he did a big shuffle and transferring me back into a team command, which was what's fine by me. Um and then two months later, things happened.

Travis Yates 3:03

Yeah, new chief. I've heard that phrase a lot. I've experienced that phrase a lot. And when we talk about leadership here, uh we talk about it so much because literally one person can do irreparable damage to an organization. That's not just in law enforcement. We see that quite a bit in law enforcement. And so you wrote this book about this incident, and I don't know how you're gonna kind of digress this down in a conversation because it's so extensive, but just just hearing from you, talk to us about that incident, and then I'll sort of fill in the blanks and go from there because I certainly have some points I want to talk about that I think will speak to our wider audience.

The Call That Sparked Everything

Arthur Myers 3:39

Well, I was doing what a good lieutenant does sit in my office on my behind. Um, and we got into a call for a suspicious person that was trying to uh looking in backyards, looking in houses and stuff. My officers got out with him and he ran into traffic, tried to get into a car, but the guy locked the car and drove off. He got into a foot pursuit, and then one of my rookie officers got separated from his FTO and got into a fight with this guy in the backyard somewhere and couldn't put out where he was. So I hoisted my teaster up and went after him to get in a car and go down and find where it was. This actually happened on Rainbow Row in downtown Charleston, which is a you know kind of famous place. Um, the guy got away, the rookie fell on a garden rake, had some pretty severe stab injuries, and ended up being a pretty severe injury in the end. And we lost him. Thought he was gone. Uh passerby basically said, Hey, I think you went in that house. As we approached the house, the homeowner came home and said, I left my house unlocked, and now the door's locked. So she unlocked the door and then she ran in, and several of my officers followed her because we told her to stop and she was going after her pet. And as they ran past a closet door at the base of the stairs there, the guy ran out the door and into the street, and I came around the corner just in time to see my officers blowing out the front door chasing him. So we engaged in yet another foot pursuit and the officers he he ran behind a house, and the house had a driveway that was covered in tea gravel. Little tiny rocks. He slipped and fell in the zone. The officers grabbed him and continued to fight. He was skinny at him. I think he tried to bite one or two. Just typical and you know, I don't want to go to jail behavior. My sergeant and I got there a little little behind the officers. Sergeant jumped in to help. At that point, we had four guys on him. I didn't think it I needed to jump on, and what I realized was, hey, I can stand back, catch this whole thing on body cam. We'll be golden if something says, 'cause we're in a backyard surrounded by fences, no one can see us. And as I was watching him, one of the officers kind of stood up as he was standing. He slapped the guy on the back of the head. And I kind of mentally noted I had asked about what that was about. And then he stood there. And he stood there. And while he was standing there, he was playing in the pea gravel with his boots and moving rocks around. But he never kicked rocks at the suspect, which is what Raider allegations said. And there was never any evidence of that. He literally could only see his knee moving on my body camera. And we made the arrest. I had a second officer injured. It happened right before the officer stood up, and I was actually looking to the side when I caught the slap out of the corner of my eye. And uh, that was it. My main concern at that point, the suspect was checked by EMS. He was fine, he went to jail, and then I had two officers getting transported, so I needed to get to the hospital to find out what's going on with my folks.

Travis Yates 6:31

Yeah, let me let me interject here, Chief, because what you just described is common, right? I mean, this is a this is a common night in the life of any lieutenant that's listening to this, right? And you had to have thought the same thing. There's nothing out of the ordinary here. Obviously, you've got to write some reports up, you've got to do some documentation, you've got to review body cameras, you've got to do all the power DMS stuff that everybody listening understands. But there couldn't have been a thought in your mind that there was anything other than that. And that's where I think this is such a familiar story. There's so many officers that I speak to that have similar stories where they thought this was normal. But as you talk about in the book, what is true and accurate oftentimes doesn't mean anything to the powers to be. Right.

Arthur Myers 7:17

So as I was headed to the hospital, the officer that had slapped on the back of the head called me when I was getting ready to call him, and I grabbed the phone. We talked for 25 seconds times. And I just said, Hey man, what was that all about? He said, Well, the guy was fit and I thought he was gonna spit on me. I said, Okay, no problem. Spitting on an officer and performance of duty is a felony in South Carolina, and if a cuff to the back of the head is enough to stop that, that's what grandma used to use on me in church when I got too loud and I didn't think anything of it. I uh checked on the officers, one was fine, and the other ended up having surgery and infection, all kinds of issues, but um that day I got back to the office, we wrote up our use of force reports, the officers wrote them up. I wrote like my review of their use of force. I addressed the fact that he slapped them on the back of the head. I used the word cuffed, which I've used in police reports throughout my career, cuffing around the heavy shoulders. It's it's kind of an older phrase, but it just means open hand slapped. And then the next day this happened on like July 1st. A lot of people were off that. I reviewed the body cam footage on the MTT as we downloaded it, it was 11 inches, it's not very good, not very big, but I saw what I saw, which is what I saw in real life. So I I waited a day or two, couldn't get the video to come back up. There was some cockamanie reason where my body cam had been assigned to the wrong person and I had downloaded it on somebody else's MDT. It's technology, right? Fails every time it's needed. So I was only able to watch the video once. So finally I was like, well, I don't want people to sit on this, I want to make sure we get this thing done. And my rule of thumb with the use of force review was to get it done within a day or two. So I did it in three days, which is a little longer than I normally would like to wait, because I don't like stuff like that sitting in the system. And I did my use of force review, and I said, you know, this is what happened, that the officer got up, the suspect appeared that you were preparing to spit on him, the officer slapped him in the back of the head. And that was the end of it.

The Report, The Video, The Blowup

Arthur Myers 9:20

And then uh Monday or Friday afternoon, actually, things started to just blow up.

Travis Yates 9:29

Yeah, I think you described this in the book. Eight days later, the real fight would begin. That was your quote. Pretty powerful. That was when I was called in to in general affairs for my interview. Yeah. So Jason describe describe your initial feelings. I mean, obviously you had to get the impression early on that something's not right here because you saw what you saw, you wrote down what you saw, you weren't trying to hide anything, you described everything. It's on video. Why would you try to hide something? It's on video anyway. Uh just kind of take us through those first those first hours, those first few days when you first discovered this is probably going a different direction than I thought.

Arthur Myers 10:07

When it first happened, I thought, huh. Well, you know, I watched all the body worn cameras, so I knew what they all should have. Most of them were in the dirt during the fight, they all came off. Maybe maybe something happened before I got there. Because, you know, I didn't see the guy fall down, the officers were ahead of us in the book or two. Maybe something happened and it got caught on somebody's door cam or something. I had no idea. Um And then when I got called in, they they showed me the video, and I got to see it on the 21-inch screen, which is the biggest one I'd seen it. I said, Yeah, he's doing this. And then as he gets up, he comes to the guy that's gonna spit on him, so he kind of taps him on the back of the head. And uh we watched it some more, and I said, Well, what's he doing with his legs? And I said, Oh, he's he's playing in the rocks, because he kind of made like a little puddle of or pile of pea gravel with his with his boot. But he never kicked But you can't see any of that on the video. And they never asked me if he kicked rocks during my interview. That was something that totally caught me off guard when I went to the findings hearing months later. But um it it just I honestly didn't know what to think. You know, when you started internal affairs and the investigation, they could say don't talk to anyone, you're not allowed to speak to anyone. Although the irony was I learned stuff from other officers about the incident that I didn't even know before my interview because people were already talking about it. The other office had already been interviewed before me. And then I initially got sent to my I went back to my office. I was like, well, I'm probably gonna get a letter on my file for something. This is no big deal. It's nothing. I went back to work. And a couple hours later, the internal affairs lieutenant, who is a good friend of mine, calls me and says, Hey, uh Rusty, I need you to come to the station, we gotta get your car, and they're uh putting you on admin leave.

Admin Leave And Criminal Suspicion

Arthur Myers 12:00

That's when I really was like, What? What? And he couldn't answer me because of course he can't say anything at that point. He's the investigating officer. So I I drive to the station and I ask what's going on, and he's just like, I just gotta put you on admin leave, it's okay. So at least there's that. I called my wife to come pick me up and take me home. She was so nervous she couldn't do it, so she grabbed my father to come down, and I I handed over my gun and everything. I got in the car and went with my dad and my wife. I looked at my dad, I said, I don't have any idea what's going on. All I know is I haven't lied and I did what I was supposed to do. And then at a long drive home, during that drive, I'm terrified that I still had my FOP coverage, thank God. Because if I'm saved my house on the long run, but and that was it for a long time. I went home every day, kind of expected a phone call to come back in for another interview, to be talked to, or to give another statement, or to say something. But I literally had no idea what I was was even being accused of until I went to my findings hearing with the uh deputy chief there at the puppet for the city.

Travis Yates 13:14

So yeah, and what you may not know at the time is they launched a criminal investigation.

Arthur Myers 13:20

Right. I didn't realize that at first. Yeah.

Travis Yates 13:24

Let me just I mean, I'm just gonna say this and I'm gonna get ahead of you. This guy didn't complain about any of this. It wasn't on video. Uh, you know, there was some discussion in some of your hearings about, well, why was he playing with rocks? And I think your response was, we don't we don't dictate after stress and use of force what people do, if everybody acts a little differently. I've I've certainly spent 30 years on the job and I've seen all kinds of crazy things. I watched a guy put seven rounds in a guy and he swore to me to put one round in him. And I said, Don't say a word. You know, you got to wait a couple of days and these memories are gonna come back to you. So we all understand that. Um, but it must have been, and listen, I I've experienced some of this because the law enforcement they treat their own worse than anybody inside the walls. The stress we get is not from the politicians or the media, it's from inside our own walls. And we can't do this any worse. And departments, by and large, do this the same way as what you just described. Somebody listen to this in the private industry may be like, what in the world did I just listen to? Welcome to law enforcement. And you you're someone that's never been in trouble. I mean, you you documented all this stuff. It was all the IA file. It's completely pointless. Yeah. And somebody somewhere decided this was something they were going to pursue. And of course, the the background of this is this this is the weeks or months following the George Floyd incident where many in law enforcement and leadership lost their mind. You know, that some incident in thousands and thousands of miles away somehow, you know, had something to do with their department, and people lost their mind, and there's still not been an accounting for what they did to law enforcement during that time. And I'm speaking about our own leaders. Uh, so this is sort of in the background, and they were obviously looking for some sort of incident to virtue steal to the public that they're not going to tolerate, I guess, someone kicking rocks, but whatever it is. But the difficult part, I'm glad you described it in your book, because I think even if no one's been through this, they've been through this in ways such as retirement, where the isolation is the worst. Right? You have such a huge identity in this profession. And and I can speak for me, I thought I had hundreds of friends. And there were occasions throughout my career, whether it would be an IA investigation or the media did some hit job on me or something like that, where I found out I had about two.

unknown 15:44

You know what I mean?

Travis Yates 15:45

Everybody, people that I had I had spent in the worst dregs of society, you know, with fighting for their life and surviving with people. I'm talking, you know, murdered cops in the trenches. You know, we thought we were bonded by by what this by this. And then when a little bit of uh unsettling news comes, whether it's true or not, they just abandon you. And you felt that kind of describe the feeling of that.

Isolation, Identity Loss, And Betrayal

Arthur Myers 16:14

I think that called the chapter in the book the narrowing. That was kind of the narrowing of the people that were paying attention to. I mean, I went from being a lieutenant responding to stuff every day to nothing. Literally nothing. It was just a total shock. You're like, one day you're a police officer, you're a commander, you're doing your job, and next day you're sitting at home wondering why is my career over? What's going on here? And it looks devastating, doesn't really cover it.

Travis Yates 16:45

You're right. You're right. Devastation doesn't even come close. It doesn't even come close. And and you people deal with it in various ways. I'll give you an example that has nothing to do with discipline or this or this, but I saw a guy recently at my church and I knew him from the profession, and he looked like something was definitely wrong. And I walked up to him and I said, Hey, are you doing okay? And he goes, No, uh, I'm about to get a divorce. I've been drinking heavily, everything's gone off the rails. And I said, What happened? And he goes, I retired. I retired. So this I mean, this, I mean, so you can multiply that times a thousand on what you did. You didn't plan this. This wasn't something that you did, you didn't make this decision. You were just simply doing your job, and you find yourself under a criminal investigation and then an internal investigation. And even though you know you didn't do anything wrong, the stress, I don't think we can dis you could describe it, Chief, what the stress does to you in these moments.

Arthur Myers 17:49

I can't. I really can't. It was uh when the first sled agent called me for the investigation at that point. I knew they were doing a criminal investigation. At first I just talked to him for a second and I said, Oh minute, you know, I probably need to make sure my attorney's okay with me meeting with that. And he's like, you have an attorney. Yeah, because it occurred to me that these guys that had been my comrades my entire career, now I was the suspect. And that was that was a shock too, to realize that I'm now a suspect itself. And one of the things he told me when I talked to him is, yeah, they're looking at a possible cover-up. And my my first thing I said was cover up. How can it be a cover-up? It's in my recordings on my body cage. I couldn't have covered this up if I don't wanted to. And then is when I realized, no, I'm a suspect. I need to make sure my attorney knows what's going on here. And to his credit facility agent at that point did not use anything, and I hadn't said much, but he didn't use anything I said against me. It's uh super disturbing when you realize that these guys aren't on my side anymore.

Travis Yates 18:58

Yeah, and let me tell you what a common practice is. Uh, especially they'll use the criminal proceedings to basically force you out of the job. That's what they actually did to you. We'll talk about that in a minute, because it's a very scary proposition if you didn't do anything at all. And how they do that and how many officers have actually been prosecuted, because it's not about a conviction. They know if they can put your mug on television from being arrested or being investigated. That's it. Your your career is ruined. That's that's what, because oftentimes that's all they care about. They don't care about the truth. They don't care about, you know, getting, you know, an actual, it's just about defamation, embarrassment, make sure he can't do anything economically past his career. And so there have been, I would say, nine out of ten cops arrested in this country, just from my experience, are never convicted. Now, the the other side will go, oh, that means there's corrupt cops. No, that means there's cops that are being arrested for no reason for doing their job. And how they do this, and I'll explain to people how they how many times they do this, is you get accused of a crime, somebody, I mean, for instance, it's this one, and they never come and talk to you, chief. They don't interview you, they'll interview a few witnesses, never get your side of the story, and that passes for probable cause for an arrest. That is happening all over the country because they know if they came and talked to you. Now, in this case, they did, but I'm talking about an instance when officers are actually arrested, because they know if they came and talked to you, they would have no case. It would all be explained. And so they purposely don't talk to you and only talk to somebody making the allegation, and they get just enough, and of course, you and I both know you can write affidavits the right way where prosecutors can move on it. Now, this is done to suspects as well. It's still not right there, and it's still not right if it's done to a cop. And so this is sort of the game that's being played, and there's no doubt there were people above you that wanted you arrested, or this wouldn't have been ended up in a criminal proceeding. It's so ridiculous. And of course, they ended up clearing you in a criminal proceeding, and then you were told, Oh, now you get your internal affairs investigation, and you get to go through that. So let's talk about that briefly.

Arthur Myers 21:06

So I basically they never told me I was cleared my attorney did. He called me and said, Well, there's no charges for you. You've been cleared by Sled, and I found five. Oh, okay, well, I'm cleared by a sled, that makes sense. That should be an open and set in federal affairs. I didn't do it.

Travis Yates 21:21

And then uh because they actually said there was no evidence. They actually said no evidence that this ever occurred. Yeah, the sled reports.

Arthur Myers 21:30

Yeah, I was pretty detailed. When I originally wrote the book, the little sled summary of the incident was only three pages long. I went back and I was like, you know what? No one's gonna accuse me of leaving anything out. So it grew to, I think, seven or eight, nine pages, whatever it is now. I know it's it's a lot to read.

Travis Yates 21:44

Well, think of the irony, Chief. If the sled report would have said you did it, they would have taken that as gospel and you'd be going, you'd be going to jail. But the sled report said you didn't do it, and they go, Well, maybe there's still something there. Welcome to law enforcement leadership in far too many ages.

Arthur Myers 22:00

Yeah.

Travis Yates 22:01

I mean it was uh I was happy. I was celebrated.

Arthur Myers 22:04

I called my parents. Hey, I'm getting cleared, you're good, I'm waiting on the call. And uh finally after three days, I called them and said, Hey, what's what's going on? It's like, oh, we just started during general affairs investigated. It was on hold during the sled investigation.

Travis Yates 22:18

Yeah, you mentioned that you went 140 days without anyone, right? I cut one off for the book without anybody calling you. And and so let's talk about that 140 days for a minute.

Self-Medication, Counseling, And PTSD

Travis Yates 22:32

You can you must have had so many things going through your mind, and I hate to say it, but it's probably a better diet than the divorce diet and the stress that it does to your body. But um, how did you cope with that, the the positive ways and the negative ways?

Arthur Myers 22:52

Positive way was I needed to do something, and I realized, you know what, I always wanted a pool. I bought a used pool off of a um Facebook marketplace, got a shovel and started digging. Um I mean it's an above-ground pool, but I buried it in the ground about 18 inches. And I just basically every day I would go out before or right as the sun came up and work until about 12 or 1 when it got too hot. Still all good in South Carolina, you know. When it got too hot, I'd go inside and then then the negative stuff would start, and I would self-medicate with alcohol. Never never been a drinker my entire life. I just never had a flavor for alcohol. I still don't. But it it calmed it calmed my brain. And I would wait till four o'clock because I knew at four o'clock, they weren't gonna call me in for an interview that day. So I would wait until four o'clock before I ever and then I I measured out. I knew three shots was enough to make me happy. Two or three hours, I could just sit in the easy chair and not think about anything. Four shots made me feel sick. So I had to assign it. I was self-medicating is what I was doing. And um, my wife, God bless her, I I give her credit for saying that my wife one day she walked out. I was sitting in the yard, I'd been working on digging the hole and leveling the yard and put down side. Well, I did everything. My yard's beautiful, and I was like, I don't recommend anyone do that. It's not the way to do your yard. But um, she walked out, said something about what do I want for lunch, and I was aggravated hot, and I snapped at her. She looked at me and said, Rusty Miners, you better get some help before you do something stupid. And she said it just like that. And I sat there, she walked inside, I sat there with my shovel in my hand, and I started thinking about, you know, all the classes that I had run as a training commander, classes I had sat through. And I remembered a checklist that they had talks about one of the classes. I started thinking about that checklist, and I've started going on the checklist, and I realized I was checking every single box. Because here's the thing when you're on admin leave or you're terminated, all the EAP stuff that the city has, all that's gone. It's on you now. You have no resource for the department that you work for.

Travis Yates 25:17

And you combine that with you have no support structure in the agency because no one's calling you, no one's reaching out. Yeah.

Arthur Myers 25:23

Yeah. So I uh got on the phone, ironically, got disconnected, and I called right back. Lady was upset that she hadn't got my name or anything before we got disconnected. And she asked me the question, are you gonna are you speaking about killing yourself? And I said, Well, I mean, I'm not gonna do anything right now, but yeah, the thoughts there. So she sent me up for an appointment the next morning. I went in, met with her once, and then she handed me off to uh gentlemen who specialized in first responders because they're difficult greed to deal with. And I started getting counseling, and I would go most of the time, once or twice a week. Wasn't always the best at attending. And I put it in a book, I talked about how it's shameful when you skip a meeting because you don't want to tell your counselor you're still drinking. This is the guy that's supposed to be listening and understanding with long story short, we went through a lot, and what what he really identified was it wasn't just what I was going through now, this was just the catalyst. It was all the other stuff that I had packed in my backpack or stuck in my closet over the years, all the traumas I'd seen. That you know, we all see. It's just a Tuesday, right? You'd shove it in that closet or you'd pack it in your backpack, whatever you want to use for the phrase. And one day it blows up. And for me, this was the blow-up. My PTSD had come out full force, and I was at a really dangerous place.

Travis Yates 26:51

Yeah, I think what you just described, and and you you describe it as post-traumatic stress injury in the book, and you're correct, it's cumulative, you may not even understand it's happening. But I think where it where it overflows for many people, and that's just my experience with many people, is when you walk away from the department, either the way you had to, or just voluntarily is retirement. Retirement is supposed to be a celebratory thing, and that is when they, for the first time, someone steps back and they go, they have time to think, they have time to ponder that 20 or 30 year career. And sometimes the dreams happen. I can speak for me. I'm three years from retirement, and the dreams are still happening once in a while. My prayer to the Lord before I go to bed is to give me peace because there are nights that aren't peaceful. I don't quite understand it because I didn't there weren't that many critical events, you know, that made the news I was involved in. There were a few, but as you said, it's cumulative and you don't even know it's under the surface until you walk away and have time away from it. And so that's kind of what you just described there.

Arthur Myers 27:54

Yeah, it was uh it was bad. And a brief story, when I first started writing a book, I titled it Tattered When the Blue Line Failed. But what I realized as I wrote the book and started talking about my friends that had worked with me and had conspired actually together to kind of keep an eye on me. They were all cops. They were just cops who knew me as a man, knew me personally, and knew it was just a vocal thing. And that's when I changed the title to win the blue line phrase. That's blue line fray, it didn't it didn't break. Men who knew me stood beside me and made sure I got through it. And with the help of them and my wife, I did. But uh I wouldn't wish it on any of it. I my whole goal in writing the thing was I want to give that two and a half years of preference, you know. I talked earlier I was a training commander, and honestly, when I stood back with my body cam, my training mind was going, oh, this is a perfect example of a resisting arrest. We're doing it right, we're gonna lock him up, no big deal. I'll have it on video. We can show this as a training video. Well, it's the same thing here. You know, you see you said earlier the courage to say this. I'm just trying to give that two years meaning, and I am tired of losing officers to suicide, and I understand it now. I understand it in a way I never did.

Travis Yates 29:14

Yeah, I think one of the most powerful things, Chief, that you wrote in the book, and maybe you don't think so, but it it spoke to me. And you wrote, quote, sometimes five or six friends is enough. The reason that spoke to me is because I mean, when I tell you I spent 30 years in a career with 800 men and women, that I thought, I don't know, half of them would probably come visit me in the hospital. Uh, no, about two of them cared, right? And that really upset me for a long time. Like that was more upsetting than anything else ever happened to me. And you talk about the isolation of the book until I realized that I was fortunate to have two, and you're fortunate to have five or six, so it's a different way of looking at it, right?

Termination, Grievance, And Certification Fight

Travis Yates 29:58

So, so just to bring this thing to a just bring this story full force, um the investigation IA and they they moved to terminate you, which is even crazier. That story gets crazy. Kind of talk us about that. They offered you a deal when you grieved it. You and let's just go.

Arthur Myers 30:19

Well, they had initially said when I when I first went to HR after I'd been told I was being terminated, I had to go over there and actually file a grievance. And they tried to say, well, no, you know, if you don't do this, we'll give you your your annual leave, which is about $17,000. Um and then I declined. I'm grieving this. I didn't do it. I green I served on the grievance board, I know how to present this. So I the grievance board voted. There were seven people there, only five of them even voted. And they sent me a coward.

Travis Yates 30:52

I cannot believe the cowardice of not even voting. Unbelievable.

Arthur Myers 30:57

The uh two lines, you know, hey, the mayor supports their decision, they they agreed, you're terminated. So that was the end of that. And then I got a letter after the grievance, which I thought was very unusual, offering me basically the same deal, except they would they said, you know, we will not appear at the misconduct hearing, because they referred this to our police academy for misconduct. We won't appear at the misconduct hearing, and and that way you may keep your certification. And I when I read it, there was a line in there about unless lawfully subpoena. And we did some research, my attorney and I, and we found out that the academy was now subpoenaeing any agency to a misconduct hearing. And I gotta believe they knew that.

unknown 31:42

Yeah.

Arthur Myers 31:43

I was curious, I was ready to file with the bar for attorney misconduct, my lawyer said it's just no way, it's not, it's a standard thing. So that was like, well, obviously I'm not taking this deal. You know, unfortunately, my family was able to help. I I I never could have done this by myself. I had so many people helping me that it was not standing on my wife because it could have gone so bad. And everybody doesn't have that. You know, it really doesn't have an extended family that's there to help, it's there to listen. But um we defined everything and they said, okay, well, we'll send it to the academy. We went up there for the first hearing, it's just before a lawyer is the judge for the academy. Both sides present their case, and the the case is a preponderance of evidence, which is pretty terrifying when you think about it. That's 50% an offended. Yep. Several months after they present it, we get a letter saying inconclusive. The guy couldn't even decide. It just was more cowardice.0001. You know, I was like, oh my God.

Travis Yates 32:48

And I hope our audience is getting a picture when we always talk about cowardice of how prevalent it is. It's just prevalent everywhere. No one wants to take a side, no one wants to make a decision. Your experience is at the detriment of not only what you're going through, but you've got to pay the bills. You've got a family to support, and this is this thing is continuing on.

Arthur Myers 33:05

Well, that's why I I've told a number of people. If you have an officer going through this, I've been there. I sold off my hobbies, I sold off everything that he had basically, except the house. And if there's an officer going through this and needs a copy of my book to give them some motivation, I'll send it to them. I'm not out to make money with it. If they need it, I'll get it to them. Because it's uh it's not a good experience. It's horrible. It's just horrible. Anyway, we finally have our final hearing before the law enforcement training council, which is the big one that they're gonna say yes or no. They have to say yes or no, they can't conclude it. And uh the whole way up there, I wrote with my attorney. My attorney was a former police officer. I selected him because I knew he was a former police officer, and he knew the system. And we wrote up together, and the whole way up, he's talking, he's preparing me. We're gonna lose. These are chiefs. They side with chiefs, you know, don't worry about it. This isn't the last step. We have this option and this option and this option. So I went in there fully upset and lose. And we sat there, presented everything, and the first person to speak was the attorney general of the state of South Carolina who said, Why are we here? This is not misconduct. And I'll I'll never I'll never forget that. Why am I here? Why is this happening? Why am I here? And ironically, when we get done the practice trial with uh the attorney's wife, she's now actually a judge, as the judge, she stopped us like five minutes into the practice and goes, wait a second, that's the case? Why are we here? And it was hilarious that the same phrase came out of two different mouths when they actually looked at the evidence.

Travis Yates 34:52

Yeah, so they cleared you of any wrongdoing. It's just an unbelievable story of what these cowards at Charleston, South Carolina Police Department did to you. It's not confined to just there. We hear these stories all the time. It's incredible you've been able to tell this story because listen, we're not going to be able to convince bad men and women that are leading to change, but we can run them out of this profession and warn people of them. And if anyone, uh this is me saying it, I don't think you're, you know, um, if anyone uh is wanting to go to work from Charleston, South Carolina, you better make sure these leaders still aren't there.

Arthur Myers 35:28

Because if they'll do it if it's a new administration now.

Travis Yates 35:32

Yeah. Well, I'll say that about any department because if they'll do this to a lieutenant, they'll do it to anybody. And talk for the street cops before you take the job.

Arthur Myers 35:40

Do what the street cops say.

Travis Yates 35:41

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and we didn't do the story justice. You've got to get the book. The name of the book is uh pattered when the blue line phrase, all major booksellers, Amazon, everywhere else. It's pretty amazing. You talk about things that we didn't get to mention here, but you talked a lot about optics because that enforcement is where law enforcement learns to move to. It's kind of ironic to me that a profession that deals in evidence, that deals in truth, really oftentimes just deals in what looks good, what are the optics, what are people going to think, which is just complete cowardice. That's what they did here. For some reason, they got in their head that this was something they needed to pursue. And here is the tragic and evil thing at the same time, Chief. They knew from the very beginning what it took, I don't know, a year for the state of South Carolina to finally say there was nothing here. Two years. Two years. I don't know if there's anybody. That chief and that mayor, they knew when this thing started what would be found out in two years. They were just banking on the fact that you would not have the resolve to make it for two years and to go all this way because they tried to offer you a deal. And by the way, they knew in the back of their mind, well, maybe this does more than destroy him. Like we don't, that's just how much they don't care to do that to somebody. And we have to keep talking about it because if we don't talk about it, it's going to keep

Faith, Survival, And Choosing Forgiveness

Travis Yates 37:11

happening. You talk about something in the book, and we're going to bring this to an end that is so powerful is your faith. And I will tell you, my experience with my faith in Jesus Christ is when things got bad, is when I grew closer. When things felt like I couldn't dig out of it, is when I got closer. Was that your experience? Because it's not everyone's experience. Was that your experience?

Arthur Myers 37:36

To a degree, but it took a lot.

Travis Yates 37:38

Yeah.

Arthur Myers 37:39

You know, I kind of had to reach the bottom before I started realizing, you know, I I believe in Jesus and God my whole life I've been at church. And I I mean my first book I wrote was actually based on a play I wrote for church. The uh just the slap in the face, and then you're sitting there and you're just like I I talk about in the book, the poem Footprints in the Sand. And I've heard that sort of it's a beautiful song, beautiful poem. But after having gone through this, I could actually identify with the person who wrote it. Because I realized when I was at my lowest, I didn't have the strength of faith. Because I've had faith in my career. This is this is a godly profession. We're mid in authority, we're called by God to do what we do. And to have it just pulled out from under you, and you're just like, I I just don't know what's going on. I I don't understand. But when I looked when I look back, God put the right people around me to do the right things at the right times, to say the right things. He put my wife there, she's never been a quiet woman, she gives me her opinion quite often. And I knew she hated the drinking because it's not something she'd ever seen before. It was just I I didn't know how to control any of it. And over time I began to see the hand of God in everything that happened. Even to the point of this. So many people keep telling me, well, most people would never say this. This is so courageous. I I don't feel like it's courageous. I just feel like it's it's another training bitty. It's something people need to know so they can get through it without hurting themselves. I had a I had an extensive plan and I I talked about some of the books, what my plan was, and you know that to faith quietly when I went through and I used Bible verses because I have a master's in religion. Yeah, and I knew all the verses. And I would sometimes I would just read through stuff and read the Bible and be like What if nothing's working on me? You know, what if everything's falling apart? My mother, God bless her, when she read the book, she went through and looked up every single Bible verse I had used and told me you need to put references in there for every Bible verse because an officer might look that verse up. That might be the change in their life. So, as you know, in the book now, every Bible verse has a scriptural reference, people can look it up. Um my faith was like it was ugly at first when it's when everything happened, and I just felt like the world was destroying me. And you know, you talked about it earlier. I honestly felt at some point like they just wanted me to kill myself. Let's go away. Don't be a problem anymore.

Travis Yates 40:38

No, there's no question. There's no question. I don't, I'm not gonna get in the mind of evil men and women, but there's no question there's there's when you hear the story, Chief, there's no other explanation for it. And I will tell you, you won this case, you're you're thriving, you're doing you're you know, you've you've done something very positive out of this, but I will I'll speak from experience, and I just wonder what your experience is. The thing that hurts the most that it's hard to get away from is the betrayal. What's your thoughts on that?

Arthur Myers 41:08

It was tough, and for a long time I was very angry. And then one day when I worked at Somerville, I was talking to a captain named Larry Johnson. Larry passed away from cancer, but uh I was talking to him, and he was a believer as well, and we were kind of sharing stuff, and he said something about forgiveness that really hit me hard. And I started thinking about it, and I finally decided this is this is the catch 22 of forgiving people. It's not for them. Yep. It's for you. Yeah, it's so that you can say it's over, it's done, it's water under the bridge. Would I have done the same thing in their position? I don't think so, but I don't know. I wasn't in that position. And so I just I wrote letters to them and I said, Look, the hardest part of this was watching my friends go through it. Whether they were with me or against me, I'd forgive you. And that's all it said. They were very short, one or two sentences, and just I forgive you. My dad asked me, did anyone ever respond? And I was like, no, no one ever sent me a letter back. I didn't expect it. But you know, now I'm in a position where I see these folks every day. We work together on any major incidents that were involved in the city and the college, all the other units working together. I hug their neck when they get promoted. I just that was all that was years ago. It's over. I ended up in a great place. My chief here has been super supportive, and and I know he caught flack when he hired me. I know he didn't. And the fact that he had the courage to to hire the man he knew and not the one the world told him I was speaks a lot to him, too.

Travis Yates 42:41

Yeah, those are those leaders are rare. So my I'm very grateful that you found that leader, chief. And you know, just something in the story that we forgot to mention, and then we're gonna bring this thing to a close, is the officers involved, they didn't go through. I mean, they weren't even one one guy quit because voluntarily, but one guy, what, he got a letter or something or got cleared? I mean, there were there, you were the only one that really went through this, right?

Arthur Myers 43:06

Me and the officer who did the slap, he resigned and just got out of law enforcement completely. Now I guess he was probably offered a similar deal to what I had, although I had a lot more time anything. He just resigned. The officer who fell on the rake eventually left, one of the officers that was on the ground that day just said, I'm not doing this for the rest of the world. And one of them was significantly hurt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had the staff infection.

Travis Yates 43:32

Can you imagine that doing your job, getting a life-threatening disease or vi or whatever from it, almost dying, and then you're still treated like that? It's just unbelievable. And I can't thank you enough for sharing a story for coming on. Um it's a brutal story. If you're listening, it's kind of a heavy story, but I think it's important to understand this story because we'll never going to correct us in the future if we don't tell stories as we just told with Chief Meyer. So Chief, thank you so much for being on. Uh I'll I'll I'll leave it with you as

Final Advice And Closing Message

Travis Yates 44:05

we close out. Any words of wisdom you want to give our audience.

Arthur Myers 44:12

Sunrise. Everything that we go through in life, it's it's just that. We're a poster note in God's library. And the world needs you. The world wants you to be here, whether the people around you think that at the time or not. And you need to be here. You got families, you have kids, you have people that care about you. If you need help, reach out. Reach out. There's a list of resources in the back of the book. All you gotta do is type in cop needs help online and go get a dozen different places you can go to. It doesn't cost anything. Get help. And whatever else happens, remember we're the peacemakers, and we need you, but stay in the fight.

Travis Yates 44:49

Thanks so much, Deputy Chief of Police Arthur Myers. He's the author of Tattered when the Blue Line Phrase. Thank you so much for being here. And if you've been listening, thank you for doing that. Spending your time with us today. And just remember lead on and stay courageous.

Announcement 45:06

Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at TravisYates.org.