Emails from police officer include commercials, police footage, graphic photos


Elkhart police Lt. Brent Long was suspended for four days and put on probation for forwarded emails including graphic photos and beer commercials.

Emily Pfund
Documents released to The Elkhart Truth on Friday, Dec. 5, shed a little more light on an investigation into inappropriate emails sent from the work accounts of three Elkhart police officers to various city employees.
Disciplinary hearings for two of the officers — Det. Scott Weaver and Lt. Peggy Snider — are scheduled for Dec. 19 and Jan. 19, respectively. Chief Laura Koch has requested the Elkhart Board of Public Safety fire Snider and demote Weaver and suspend him for four days.
The case for the third officer, Lt. Brent Long, was decided Nov. 12. He was suspended for four days and placed on probation for one year.
INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED
The emails were apparently uncovered during the discovery process for an unrelated lawsuit filed against the city by a former employee. Chad Dyer, a former network administrator for the city’s information technology department, filed a lawsuit in June 2013 alleging the city did not pay him overtime for which he was eligible and eventually fired him after he asked the city to review his job classification. He claims that when he asked the city to review his job classification — which said his position was not eligible for overtime — and pay him for the overtime work he had done, his requests were ignored and he was eventually fired.
Dyer’s suit, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, argues he was fired because he insisted that the city comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Scott Duerring, Dyer’s attorney, said the case is still in the discovery phase and a trial date has not been set yet.
“My understanding is that the city was going through information based on a request we made and that’s how they supposedly found these other emails,” Duerring said of the emails that prompted disciplinary action against the three officers.
The Elkhart Police Department has declined to comment on how the emails were discovered.
LONG’S EMAILS
The emails that prompted the disciplinary action against Long, obtained by The Elkhart Truth through the Indiana Access to Public Records Act, include seven messages with video or photo attachments sent between January 2009 and January 2011.
One of Long’s emails shows photos of a man who jumped off a ledge on a building while running from police in Atlanta in 2003 and was decapitated after landing on a fence. The photos show the man’s body lying in a pool of blood in a parking lot and his head still on the fence.
Another includes a video of a man being electrocuted by touching a power line while standing atop a stopped train.
In one of the videos, a man is seen dancing backwards into a busy street and being struck by an ice cream truck.
Some of the content included in the emails are television commercials. A commercial for Heineken shows a group of women screaming in excitement while looking at a massive walk-in closet. A group of men has the same reaction standing in a walk-in freezer stocked with beer.
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In another commercial, this one for a cell phone carrier, a woman tries to surprise her significant other with a pole dance in their living room, but the pole collapses.
Two of the videos include police actions. One was recorded by a police dash cam and shows an officer arresting a man who appears to be intoxicated and was driving a hydraulic lift down the street.
Another shows a group of men, identified in the email as bank robbers, running out of a building and into a car just before a group of police officers run past them and into the building. The video is not a real robbery, but was part of a commercial, according to hoax-debunking site Snopes.com.
There is no comment from Long in the body of any of the emails. The emails were forwarded to various other accounts without comment. The email files provided to The Elkhart Truth did not include the recipients Long sent the messages to.
Requests for the emails involved in the disciplinary actions against Snider and Weaver are still pending with the city’s legal department, as is a request for a copy of the city’s email and computer use policies.
Long declined to comment Friday afternoon.