Good Cop for September 2013: Corporal Timothy Brasuell

Why he deserves it: For the month of September, the Peaceful Streets Project has selected Bethel Heights (Arkansas) police officer Corporal Timothy Brasuell as the good cop of the month. Corporal Brasuell was being pressured by his police chief, Don Mckinnon, to generate arrests and tickets regardless of whether or not the victims had committed any traffic violations. In other words, he was pushing crooked cop behavior by his subordinates in order to generate revenue for the department. Disgusted, Brasuell decided to record his chief’s instructions.

His chief implicated himself a number of times, to include giving Brasuell his piece of advice:

“I wanna stop that car load of dumb sh*** in the car, I wanna stop it, but they are not going to do anything wrong.
Hell, I’ll get behind or the other lane and I’d start crowding them.
Kinda dirty pool but i got two or three arrests out of it.”

Sadly, despite the courage of this cop that was wiling to cross the thin blue line to expose a criminal police chief, the county prosecutor decided to do nothing – showing us once again that it is going to take much more than one cop standing up to see justice served. However, we cannot blame Corporal Timothy Brasuell for the cowardice of his department or the prosecutor. If they had even a small fraction of the courage of Corporal Brasuell, then Don Mckinnon would have been charged for conspiracy. At least the city council chose to fire the corrupt police chief.

We still haven’t been able to find a Hero Cop of the Month because we haven’t found a cop willing to stand up to the thin blue line and arrest criminal cops within their ranks. However, we celebrate good and brave actions by cops and that is why we name Corporal Timothy Brasuell our Good Cop of the Month for September.