Jervis Middleton – Black and Blue

Torn between community and badge, Officer Jervis Middleton had to make a choice. It didn’t go well.

On a muggy evening early in the pandemic, Jervis Middleton, an off-duty police officer in Lexington, Kentucky, sat in his cruiser typing determinedly on his phone. The city was tense. One week earlier, a video of white Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin slowly asphyxiating George Floyd had set off national protests, and Middleton and his fellow officers had been facing crowds of angry demonstrators in the streets for days. The brass had sent out an alert offering overtime to cops willing to work extra shifts.

They are calling some of our folks in, Middleton typed into Facebook Messenger.

I gave them a big fat NO again. He added, sloppily, Im about to monitor our radio traffic. He glanced at the message and hit send.

He then flipped on his radio and listened for useful intel. He eavesdropped for only a few minutes, according to later testimony from the department's 911 administrator, but those few minutes would go a long way toward costing him his job.

Police investigators would later conclude that Middleton was conspiring with the enemy, so to speak. At the other end of those messages-obtained from the city through a public records request, along with a trove of documents related to the department's investigation of Middleton-was his friend Sarah Williams, a local activist. In making the case for Middleton's firing, the department's prosecutors would emphasize his radio monitoring and a handful of his messages that they argued included "departmental" or tactical information. Middleton had shared a screenshot, for example, of the internal notice offering overtime to officers. He mentioned at one point that an emergency response unit was rolling out.

Another time, he informed Williams he was driving around (off duty) to see if he could spot any plainclothes officers working the crowds he didn't.