“I’ve been thinking about how I really wanted to treat people differently,” he said. “And it had an impact, that’s for sure.”
Chief Magnus began his law enforcement career as a dispatcher in the Lansing Police Department in 1979, rose through the ranks to become Chief of Police in Fargo, ND, in 1999, helping set up a refugee liaison program.
Later, as the chief of police in Richmond, he helped fight violent crime. In 2014, one of his last years in the department, the city recorded only 11 murders, the lowest number in more than four decades. That year Chief Magnus was photographed holding the Black Lives Matter sign and when criticized by the local police union said he would do it again.
However, in Richmond, Chief Magnus also faced a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by seven black sergeants, lieutenants and captains, despite a 2012 jury rejecting all claims. In 2015, a former Richmond police officer settled a dismissal suit with the department after saying he was fired for complaining that Chief Magnus sexually molested him and committed racial slurs. Chief Magnus called the allegations “completely wrong”.
“At that time, there were still people who said I was an easier target because I was a gay man,” he said. “This is not the first time in my career that I’ve seen it.”
In Tucson last year, Chief Magnus drew fire again when it took the department two months to release the body camera video of the death of a 27-year-old Latino man, Carlos Ingram Lopez, who repeatedly asked for water while he was withheld was by police officers.
Chief Magnus blamed the delay on a bureaucratic breakdown and said he didn’t see the video right away. But he said he wish he had done more to see it for himself. “We should have asked to see the video but it didn’t and when we finally saw it we were obviously very concerned about it,” he said. Chief Magnus offered to resign during a press conference when the video was released, but the mayor kept him updated and praised his work in a statement Monday.
