A court magistrate ruled that Mark Follington—a senior constable with the New South Wales, Australia police force—made false claims about his 2019 arrest of 25-year-old Anya Bradford.
In a March 2 court hearing, Follington said he noticed Bradford’s lack of eye contact while she sat in a hotel’s gaming lounge. In his experience, he said, people who avoid eye contact often have warrants out for their arrest. However, Bradford did not.
Follington and another officer questioned the lounge’s patrons as part of a drug investigation. When they asked for Bradford’s name as she tried to leave the bar, she allegedly told them to “f*ck off,” said she didn’t have her ID and said she had a meeting to get to, police claimed. When the two officers tried to block her exit, she ran off in the opposite direction.
Security footage from the hotel showed Follington and another officer using a stun gun on Bradford, pepper-spraying her, pulling her out of an elevator by the arm and slamming her against an ATM machine as she tried to escape.
Bradford also said that during the arrest, the officers kneeled on her chest, threw punches at her face, dragged her around by handcuffs and referred to her as “it,” a common slur against trans people.
In arrest reports, Follington accused Bradford of pushing him into a poker machine before the arrest. The accusation resulted in Bradford being charged with one count of resisting arrest and three counts of resisting police, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
However, Magistrate Michael Crompton said that Follington reviewed the hotel security footage before making his arrest report. Even though the footage showed that the alleged shove didn’t happen, the officer included it into his report anyway.
A junior officer testified that when he mentioned the report’s discrepancies to Follington, Follington told him, “We’ll be fine as long as we stick to our story.”
Bradford said that it was “unlikely” that she told Follington to “f*ck off.” Even if she had, Crompton said, that didn’t give Follington legal grounds to arrest her.
Crompton found Follington guilty of two counts of assault, one count of tampering with evidence with intent to mislead a judicial tribunal, one count of doing an act with intent to pervert the course of justice and one count of accessing or modifying restricted data, the Herald reported. Follington will have a sentencing hearing on July 26.
The other officer involved in the arrest hasn’t faced any charges. Follington remains suspended from the police force pending a departmental review, an NSW Police Department spokesperson told Newsweek. Police later dropped all charges against Bradford.
Bradford’s mother, Elizabeth Bradford, said her daughter didn’t attend the verdict hearing because she felt “let down by the system.” Elizabeth Bradford said that she personally hoped that police would be retrained on mental health issues and transgender people in order to conduct legal and fair arrests in the future.
Most trans citizens have reported facing at least one form of discrimination when interacting with Australian police, according to an April 2015 study published in SAGE Open journal. The study concluded that negative stereotypes of trans people may cause officers to be more hostile or aggressive when dealing with transgender individuals.
Update (5/27/2020, 12:23 a.m.): This article has been updated to include a statement from the NSW Police Department.
