On October 23, 2020, Metropolitan Police Department officer Terence Sutton initiated an unauthorized police pursuit that killed Karon Hylton-Brown, a twenty-year-old African American father to an infant. For ten full minutes, Sutton followed Hylton-Brown in an unmarked car at speeds prosecutors called “unreasonable.” Hylton-Brown was riding a rental scooter without a helmet on. The pursuit, predictably, ended in tragedy. After being chased through an alley, Hylton-Brown emerged from it only to be struck and killed by an oncoming vehicle. Following the incident, Sutton’s supervisor, Andrew Zabavsky, knowingly obstructed the collection of evidence to help get his man off the hook.
Zabavsky’s efforts—at least at the time—were to no avail. In September of 2024, he and Sutton were both sentenced to prison time for their complicity in Hylton-Brown’s death and the subsequent coverup. Prosecutors wrote that there was “no reason to believe” that Hylton-Brown was “a fleeing felon.” They also held that there was “no evidence that he presented any immediate risk of harm to anyone else or that he had a weapon.” Sutton received sixty-six months while Zabavsky received forty-eight months.
That is, until the “least racist person anywhere in the world” came to the rescue. Only three days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump handed a full pardon to Sutton and Zabravsky after saying earlier in the month that the officers merely “went after an illegal.” So, no harm done, I suppose. And to make matters worse, the MPD reinstated the disgraced officers two months later.
In July, the Office of the DC Auditor, Kathleen Patterson, published a report concluding that the discipline the officers received from the MPD is best described as “grossly inadequate.” The report justifiably pulled few punches. It exposed DC Police Chief Pamela Smith’s complete disinterest in the officers’ misconduct, evidenced by her blocking of their terminations and distribution of six-figure backpay checks.
Ultimately, the report recommended that the MPD do the right thing and terminate the murderous, unanimously convicted felons in their employ. Smith and the DC Police Union—get this—didn’t care for the report or recommendation. Smith declined to implement any of the report’s suggestions and the union dismissed it as a hatchet job. In an official statement, the union wrote that Patterson’s “baseless claims and anti-police rhetoric have no place in a fair and objective audit process.” But do federally convicted obstructors of justice have a place in discussions about fairness and objectivity?
In this federal fiasco, in addition to murder, mismanagement, and the miscarriage of justice, we also find evidence of an incredibly worrying ideological bloc. The MPD, its chief, its police union, and the white supremacist felon desecrating the halls of the White House are all aligned in their callous disregard of Karon Hylton-Brown’s murder. The overarching sentiment of their cruel apologetics is that the police are always right, so long as this belief places undesirables like Blacks and immigrants in the wrong. This is the MPD’s true creed, a far cry from their hideously ironic motto: “Policing with Purpose, Serving with Care.”
Featured image by Jerome Clarysse from Pixabay.