This is not how this department will operate going forward. Every one of you in this room will be held to the standard that this community deserves and any officer who cannot meet that standard will not remain in this department. After the address concluded and officers began returning to their duties, Dwayne called two of his senior investigators into his office and gave them the files he had prepared over the past week. The files contained everything his own documented account of the arrest, the incident report, the records of Bennett and Marsh's prior complaints, and the names and addresses of Carol Stevens and Patricia Mills along with his notes on what each of them had done. The investigators had their assignments by noon and the process that Dwayne had spent 7 days quietly and thoroughly preparing was now moving forward with the full authority of the department behind it.
Bennett and Marsh surrendered their badges that afternoon and left the building without saying a word to anyone. The officers who watched them leave understood clearly that the department they had all been working in had changed that morning and that the change was not temporary. The internal affairs investigation into officers Kyle Bennett and Jason Marsh concluded 3 weeks after Dwayne Cole suspended them and the findings were as comprehensive and damning as the records Dwayne had reviewed in the first hours after his arrest. 23 unjust arrests over 6 months, all involving men in residential neighborhoods, all lacking documented probable cause, and all fitting a pattern that internal affairs described in their official report as systematic profiling carried out repeatedly without consequence because the complaint review process had been broken enough to let it continue unchecked. Both officers were terminated immediately upon the conclusion of the investigation. Their personnel files permanently flagged to prevent employment in any law enforcement capacity anywhere in the state.
Bennett was 31 years old when he lost his badge and Marsh was 29, and both of them discovered quickly that termination for profiling attached to a chief's own arrest was not the kind of background any security company, government agency, or private firm was willing to overlook. The viral attention the story received after Dwayne's first week address was covered by local and then national media meant their names were searchable and their histories were visible to anyone who looked. Both ended up working jobs far removed from anything connected to authority or public service, and their careers in law enforcement were finished permanently before either of them had reached 35. Carol Stevens was charged with filing a false police report and providing misleading information to law enforcement officers. She had told the dispatcher that a black man was beating a white woman when what she had actually seen was a man breaking up a fight, and her deliberate misrepresentation of the situation had directly caused a wrongful arrest.
She was convicted, fined $18,000, sentenced to 120 hours of community service, and given a 2-year probation term. Her criminal record followed her immediately, and the neighborhood she had lived in for 19 years became deeply uncomfortable after her role in the incident became public knowledge. Patricia Mills was charged with assault for initiating the physical fight and with providing false information to police officers when she told Bennett and Marsh that Dwayne and Denise had been attacking her. She was convicted on both counts, fined $14,000, and sentenced to 90 hours of community service with 1 year of probation. The recording taken by a neighbor on their phone, which had been shared widely online, showed clearly that Patricia had thrown the first shove and that her account to the officers had been entirely fabricated to take advantage of a situation she had not caused but had it immediately exploited.