Entrance sign at Tampa Police Department headquarters. Credit: Photo via JHVEPhoto/Adobe

A longtime veteran of the Tampa Police Department used homophobic slurs while arresting a person two years ago, an internal affairs investigation found.

At a meeting last night, Tampa’s Police Citizen Review Board revealed that in December of 2020, TPD officer Bryan Perry used homophobic language while making an arrest at a Walmart.

“What the officer said was awful,” said CRB member Lincoln Tamayo during the meeting.

CRB members confirmed to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that Perry used a homophobic slur that’s commonly referred to as the “F-word” and that the officer also called the person “F-ass” and repeated the slur multiple times during the arrest.

Another officer reported Perry’s language, and he resigned in January of 2021, in the midst of an internal affairs (IA) investigation into the incident.

IA found that Perry was complicit in discriminatory conduct, and found that he also violated rules about professional responsibility and philosophy of law enforcement. IA sustained these violations against Perry after the investigation, who had already left the department. The CRB agreed unanimously with the IA’s violations found against Perry.

TPD Detective Daniel Hill with the Professional Standards Bureau said that prior to the incident, Perry had a clean record. “He didn’t have any disciplinary record to speak of,” Hill claimed to the CRB.

TPD responded to an email request for comment about the incident, and asked that the statement be published as it was sent in its entirety.

“It is understood by every member of this department that they are to treat others with dignity and respect. Those who are unable to comply with this basic expectation have no place working as a public servant. In this case, the sustained violations made by the reserve officer would have resulted in his termination had he not resigned during the investigation. The actions of the former reserve officer are not indicative of the exemplary work being done daily by dedicated employees of the Tampa Police Department. Rather, the actions of the officer who reported the unacceptable behavior more accurately reflects the fact that members of this department do not, and will not, tolerate the type of conduct demonstrated by the former reserve officer.”

At the time of the incident, Perry had served as a TPD officer for 22 years. He had recently partially-retired, Hill told the CRB, but was serving as a part-time reserve officer at a Tampa Walmart off of Hillsborough Ave. where the incident occurred.

Perry was one of several officers who arrested the person, who was only named as “Mr. Ford” during the meeting. Ford was accused of shoplifting from the Walmart. Hill claimed that Ford had resisted arrest, and during the struggle is when Perry “made several homophobic comments.”

When questioned by CL, CRB members said they could not confirm if Ford identified as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and if that was the reason Perry had used that language toward them. CL has made a public records request into the case in order to retrieve more information related to the incident.

Several CRB members questioned Hill about TPD’s process for bringing officers into the reserves. At the end of the meeting, a motion was passed unanimously to have TPD give the CRB an explainer of how the reserve officer program works.

The news of this incident comes a week before Tampa City Council is set to decide on whether or not the CRB should be able to retain its own attorney and to subpoena its own evidence.

The CRB has been criticized for years for not having power to do anything other than review closed TPD internal affairs cases and ask questions about what happened, along with voting on whether they agree or disagree with TPD’s decisions in disciplinary cases. Everything they review is based solely on claims and evidence presented by TPD itself—specifically the internal affairs department.

Last year alone, the department was involved in at least 19 scandals that the public knows of, as violent crimes such as homicide surged in Tampa.

The city is also currently under federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for TPD’s “crime free multi-housing” program, which targeted mainly Black renters for eviction.

This year, the controversies are piling up again. In July, TPD was caught using a spying tactic to pursue crimes; critics call the tactic unconstitutional. In June, officers were also caught making fun of a dog shooting that occurred at the hands of TPD, and an officer accused his supervisor of imposing DUI quotas, leading to allegedly improper arrests.