West Virginia cop fired for not shooting Black man wins $175K

Stephen Mader (l) & RJ Williams

In 2016, a White West Virginia police officer confronted a suicidal Black man with a gun and tried talking to him rather than immediately shoot him. (His fellow officers felt no such compunction and killed the man as soon as they showed up.) The department rewarded his restraint and compassion by firing him. Two years later, they’re out nearly two hundred grand:

A former police officer who alleged he was fired for not shooting a black suspect during a standoff has settled a wrongful termination suit with his former department for $175,000.

“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, 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.

Except it seems that Mader did make a decision – he chose to treat the suspect as a fellow human being who could be reasoned with rather than glance at the gun in his hands and instantly decide he had to die. Admittedly, this makes him a rarity in the US’s modern police forces, which train their officers to be warriors rather than guardians of the peace.

Mader will be a credit to whichever force hires him. It’s the Weirton PD that comes off looking like callous thugs.

(via @pdxlawgrrrl; retweet by @radleybalko)