Drunk cop, unsafe pursuits: Here are the latest violations by Fresno police officers
The Fresno Police Department fired four officers in 2024 and nearly 50 were suspended for violations of agency policies, according to a report released Tuesday.
The quarterly report from the Office of Independent Review describes sparse details of incidents and does not include the names of the officers, who are protected by privacy laws.
All four terminations came in the first half of the year, according to the report authored by Independent Reviewer John Gliatta. That’s half as many as were fired in 2023, and the lowest since the department’s two firings in 2018.
During the fourth quarter of 2024, eight officers were suspended for what totaled 790 hours, five were given a letter of reprimand and 15 were assigned additional training.
The report says “several officers” retired or resigned rather than face discipline and their violations were not required to be in the publicly released document.
The latest report included 36 instances of officers who were assigned training as discipline, a newly tracked statistic.
Unreasonable force and discourteous treatment
Three cases of alleged unreasonable force were completed in the fourth quarter.
An officer was found to have used unreasonable force, was unprofessional and used poor discretion with a minor during an incident assigned in March.
In an incident assigned in April, an officer failed to turn on their body-worn camera, the report says. Two other incidents ended with the officers cleared of wrongdoing by police.
The fourth quarter also saw the completion of 14 investigations of discourteous treatment or conduct unbecoming of an officer. Eleven of them found at least one officer violated policy, the report said.
Of those cases, an officer was found to have arrived to work while drunk, at least two officers violated policies about excessive speeds and pursuit, and one officer showed an inappropriate video to a civilian participating on a ride along, the report says.
The six investigations of performance or administrative matters found at least one officer in each case violated policy.
That included an officer who used the department’s computer system to look up a person by name on behalf of their sister and another officer who politically endorsed a candidate while on duty, the report says.
This story was originally published January 15, 2025 at 2:45 PM.
