An Oregon State Police trooper demoted from sergeant for repeatedly using a racist slur for years smiled brightly from a promotional photo posted to Facebook to recruit new officers.

Jeffrey A. Allison stood shoulder-to-shoulder with about 30 state police employees and the state police superintendent who had attended a Statewide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion conference in Salem.

“#JoinOSP become part of the #OSP Family,” said the December 2017 post.

Just nine months before, state police had disciplined Allison for his frequent use of an anti-Black racist slur while on duty over an eight-year span. A trooper angry at Allison for targeting him in an unrelated internal investigation had finally reported his boss.

Allison’s presence in a photo used to tout the state police commitment to diversity wouldn’t have seemed strange to anyone outside Oregon’s premier police agency, thanks to a cloak of secrecy around his misconduct. The agency, his supervisors and even state Department of Justice attorneys either failed to disclose Allison’s behavior or fought to hide it.

New documents released after a public records request by The Oregonian/OregonLive and other records obtained in a separate whistleblower lawsuit against state police show a pattern of apathy, obfuscation and omission surrounding Allison’s actions and that of another trooper at the Central Point field office in Southern Oregon.

The wrongdoing by Allison and trooper Gregor Smyth has led to lasting repercussions for state police.

Police supervisors and state lawyers went to extraordinary lengths to keep Allison’s demotion and the reason why from the district attorney — in defiance of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires such disclosures to prosecutors.

Then Allison was allowed to retire quietly in 2018 without his bosses reporting his misconduct to the state agency that certifies police. If he had been fired, he could have lost his police certification.

The state police superintendent at the time, as well as Allison’s wife, then a local police chief, served on the board of the police certification agency, which has the authority to revoke certifications for misconduct or failure to meet moral fitness standards.

The only ethics training instructor for state police at the time resigned in protest of how state police sheltered Allison.

Another longtime trooper who pushed state police to examine their handling of Allison’s case filed a whistleblower suit and won a $475,000 settlement in 2022. The settlement hasn’t previously been reported.

In Smyth’s case, the state last year paid $1.6 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit over a 2015 fatal shooting by Smyth and another trooper. That shooting led the current state police superintendent to issue an unprecedented apology to the victim’s family and to promise the agency would learn from the tragedy.

While responding to a domestic violence call, Smyth had trespassed on a 55-year-old man’s property and ended up killing him. Smyth had a documented history of poor decision-making and inappropriate use of force that got him kicked off the SWAT team shortly before the fatal shooting, records show.

While he was under investigation for a different use of force, Smyth brought up Allison’s use of racist language. Smyth was striking back at Allison for raising concerns about Smyth’s actions. Smyth remains on the job.

The new documents reveal details of both men’s disturbing behavior, as well as missed opportunities to censure them. Instead, the records show, state police officials deliberately protected them from further scrutiny.

Text messages on his state police cellphone show that Smyth asked a superior for the gun recovered from the man he shot and killed as a personal memento. The detail came out only after lawyers for the man’s widow fought to get investigative records that had been withheld by state police on the advice of state Department of Justice lawyers.

In Allison’s case, documents show, a state police recruit reported hearing him describe his day by saying to someone on the phone, “‘Oh, just another day with the old boot on the (racist slur’s) neck.’” The recruit said he heard Allison use the same slur a second time that day.

When state police investigated, a dozen troopers confirmed they heard Allison use the slur as a sergeant.

Allison was demoted to senior trooper and transferred out of Central Point in March 2017.

Travis Hampton, who was state police superintendent at the time but is now retired from the agency, said he wasn’t aware of every step that state police took in Allison’s discipline and referred most questions to the current administration.

In response to a series of questions from The Oregonian/OregonLive, state police spokesperson Capt. Kyle Kennedy said he couldn’t comment on the “rationale for personnel actions taken by previous administrations.”

But Kennedy said “the use of hateful or discriminatory speech warrants dismissal and demands notification to the Board on Public Safety Standards and Training for review.”

“The use of a vile and offensive racial slur is unacceptable and does not enhance the safety and livability of Oregon or foster a diverse, fair, and inclusive workplace and it will not be tolerated,” he said.

Michael Gennaco, an expert on law enforcement and accountability who was the chief attorney of the Office of Independent Review for Los Angeles County, identified multiple missteps by state police in how they dealt with Allison.

He cited their delayed decision to put him on paid leave once an internal inquiry got underway and the effort to block the DA from learning of the investigation’s findings.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland in 1963 that police have a duty to alert prosecutors about an officer’s potential credibility problems on the witness stand or the need to turn over information that might be favorable to defense attorneys.

“l cannot fathom why the agency would resist the DA’s interest in learning about the underlying incident/investigative results in order to fulfill her Constitutional Brady obligation,” Gennaco said.

ALLISON’S MISCONDUCT

Smyth reported Allison’s misconduct — only after he himself was under investigation on several fronts.

On Sept. 7, 2016, Smyth let loose when he met with state Justice Department lawyers who were preparing him for a deposition in a lawsuit over Smyth’s fatal shooting of the homeowner In Josephine County.

Smyth apparently knew Allison had reported that Smyth used excessive force during an arrest of a man months after the deadly shooting, according to state police records.

Smyth’s report prompted a state police internal investigation of Allison.

“I don’t get how he can come up with stuff like that when he goes around calling Black guys (expletive racist slur),” Smyth told state police investigators, according to a transcript. “That’s just frickin’ wrong. … After what I’ve gone through … I don’t give a damn what this agency does to me, I’m reporting him.”

State police interviewed three other troopers from the Central Point office and chose not to put Allison on paid administrative leave. Instead, while he was under investigation, the agency moved Allison up into an acting lieutenant’s supervisory role in the Central Point office to fill a vacancy, according to a senior trooper in that office.

Supervisors soon changed their minds when Senior Trooper Thomas Harrison spoke up. He texted state police union leaders that he would “go outside the agency and make some noise” if they didn’t address the problematic move.

Within days, Allison was put on paid administrative leave on Dec. 10, 2016.

The state police Office of Professional Standards also expanded its initial inquiry into Allison, after being pushed by Smyth and other Central Point troopers to interview everyone in the office who had worked under Allison instead of what they called just a handpicked few, the records show.

As a result, 12 officers confirmed to internal investigators that they heard Allison use the racist slur on duty and in uniform in front of officers and even recruits from 2008 through 2016.

One said Allison sometimes used the slur preceded by an expletive. Another heard him use it when someone in the office talked about a news story involving Black people committing a crime. Others said he used it as an adjective to denigrate people in a general sense.

Allison admitted that he used the slur multiple times on the job. He said he used it as a “slang word’’ to refer to people as “a-holes” and that it had nothing to do with race. Allison also described his remarks as “locker room banter’’ intended to help the night shift bond.

He conceded that he sometimes used the “boot on the neck” reference but denied he paired it with the racist epithet.

“As inappropriate as my language was, it was never meant to offend anyone, and was only used in jest and repartee,” Allison wrote in an internal memo in response to his demotion. “I would like to reiterate that I have never been a racist person. Insensitive, insensible, ignorant: yes. A racist? No.”

The agency found Allison violated the state police code of ethical conduct and its policy on maintaining a professional workplace and determined Allison failed to meet a “minimum level of behavior” expected of employees, especially supervisors.

Capt. Ted Phillips, who led field operations for the agency’s southwest region, said he “seriously considered terminating” Allison, but instead he demoted Allison to senior trooper on March 10, 2017, and sent him to work in Grants Pass.

He took into account Allison’s “expressed regret” and his otherwise “solid career,” Phillips wrote in a memo.

The same month of Allison’s demotion, then-superintendent Hampton issued a memo to all staff, reminding members that “honor, loyalty, dedication, compassion and integrity” are the values that define “the moral compass” of the agency. He urged members to “act with the highest levels of responsibility and accountability to maintain the public’s trust.”

OSP RESPONSE

Harrison, who had complained about Allison’s move to acting lieutenant, couldn’t believe Allison was in a state police promotional photo in late 2017, standing beside others from the agency who attended the state diversity conference.

“Do you know the story of the guy standing behind you?” Harrison texted Sgt. Yvette Shephard, the first Black woman to work as a state trooper. Harrison had previously worked with Shephard on patrol in Portland.

Shephard didn’t, so Harrison filled her in.

“Are you serious?” Shephard responded. “I didn’t know anything about that. … Very disappointing. I am offended by this act. … I don’t know why we tolerate this ever.”

Shephard was instrumental in creating a state police Inclusion Team in 2017 that was intended to serve as a “foundational voice in support of an inclusive culture.” Its members were to serve as “champions and early advocates” who could help lead diversity and equity initiatives.

In the meantime, state police still hadn’t alerted Oregon’s police certification agency — the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training — about Allison’s demotion. They finally did 10 months after the fact. State rules say that’s supposed to happen within 10 days.

State police also never informed the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training of what led to the demotion.

Absent that information, the agency never initiated a review of Allison’s police certification.

The department’s investigators rely on documents that employers send them. They don’t typically review police certifications unless police report discipline or an officer is arrested, resigns or retires during an investigation or in the course of a settlement agreement.

When Harrison filed his whistleblower suit in March 2019, a state police spokesperson defended the internal investigation of Allison and his demotion, the most serious discipline short of termination. He pointed to creation of the Inclusion Team and the requirement that all troopers take implicit bias training.

Hampton was the state police superintendent during Allison’s investigation and served on the board of the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training then.

Hampton acknowledged he knew Allison had been demoted but said he didn’t have “personal knowledge or recollection” of what the state police Office of Professional Standards submitted to the state certification department.

“I think you can appreciate the agency head does not personally perform this body of work in an agency the size of OSP,” he said by email. Hampton retired in fall 2020 and now is chief of workplace investigations for the state Department of Administrative Services. He referred all other questions to the state police.

Gennaco, the expert on police accountability, said Hampton should have ensured Allison’s police certification got reviewed by the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, while recusing himself from any votes.

Under a new law that took effect in 2022, police agencies are now required to share with the state certification department the reason for any discipline that results in a loss of pay or other economic impact.

Allison didn’t return phone calls and emails for comment.

His wife, Kris Allison, who was Central Point’s police chief at the time of her husband’s investigation and also served on the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training board then, also declined comment.

When asked if she could pass a message to her husband, she responded, “I don’t think he’ll be wanting to talk, thank you.”

The Department of Public Safety Standards and Training confirmed it found “no history of complaint or Professional Standards cases related to Allison.”

The only ethics instructor at the time for state police, Trooper Gregory Costanzo, resigned from that role shortly after he learned no one had reported the reason for Allison’s demotion to the certification agency. He retired last year.

If it had been reported, the case would have gone to the agency’s police policy committee — which Hampton and Kris Allison also served on at the time. The policy subcommittee decides if police officers meet moral fitness standards to maintain police certification and forwards its recommendation to the full board.

Costanzo, who worked out of the Central Point office, said he hadn’t heard Allison use the slur while he was working at the Central Point office but was discouraged by how state police brass handled Allison’s case and others.

“I was not going to teach anymore about moral courage and about doing the right thing,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a fraud.”

DA OUT OF THE LOOP

Some troopers chuckled uncomfortably as Jackson County’s chief deputy district attorney led a mandatory training on the do’s and don’ts of social media use at the Central Point office in December 2017.

The topic boiled down to: “How quickly you can lose your career from an inappropriate social media post or simply liking another’s racist post.”

The prosecutor clearly didn’t know what was going on with Allison.

Harrison, never one to shy away from controversy, asked the prosecutor a hypothetical question about what would happen if a trooper was using racist language on the job.

The prosecutor didn’t hesitate, telling the group that the district attorney’s office would no longer rely on that officer as a witness in criminal cases. Such a move effectively hobbles a police officer’s career.

Several days later, Costanzo met separately with the prosecutor, Jeremy Markiewicz, and learned Markiewicz had no idea about Allison’s demotion and what triggered it. Costanzo and later Harrison filled him in.

Markiewicz, now a state judge, was furious and alerted his boss.

Markiewicz would later tell an investigator, “I don’t mean to be on a soapbox or anything, but it infuriates me that somebody using that terminology these days was allowed to continue to work as an officer, as a trooper.”

By January 2018, Jackson County District Attorney Beth Heckert learned from her chief deputy about the internal investigation that led to Allison’s demotion and asked state police to share a copy of the investigation, a routine request. Heckert told state police she was concerned she may have to provide the investigation to criminal defense lawyers as part of her responsibilities under the Supreme Court’s Brady ruling.

A lawyer from the state Department of Justice advised state police not to turn over the investigation file and counseled that it wasn’t relevant for any review under the Brady decision, according to state records.

Justice Department lawyer Herbert Lovejoy suggested that the Jackson County presiding judge privately review Allison’s disciplinary records and determine if any needed to be shared with the district attorney.

Capt. Jeff Hershman, who at the time led the state police Office of Professional Standards, told an investigator he believed that personnel “corrective action” was confidential.

The judge, Timothy C. Gerking, ruled in March 2018 that Allison’s discipline didn’t relate to his honesty or trustworthiness as a witness but that defense attorneys should be told of Allison’s demotion whenever he was a witness in a case that is “somehow race-based.”

Two days later, Lovejoy wrote to the district attorney that he learned Allison might be a witness in an upcoming trial involving a Latino defendant. He then urged the prosecutor’s office to seek clarification from the judge about whether the internal investigation should be disclosed only if a defendant in a case “is a member of the race to which Trooper Allison’s pejorative word referred.”

The district attorney refused to return to the judge. She demanded full disclosure of the state police investigation of Allison whenever he was a witness in a case that involved a non-white defendant. “My obligation is to provide it and see if the defense believes it has any bearing,” Heckert wrote to the Justice Department attorney on March 22, 2018.

Four days later, Allison submitted notice of his intent to retire, effective at the end of June 2018. His final salary was $102,084 and he collects $46,020 a year in retirement.

Shortly after, Lovejoy finally provided the Allison file to the district attorney with this caution: “OSP is concerned about the information being released and used outside of any case in which Trooper Allison will be called as a witness” and urged a protective order to keep the file under wraps from further disclosure, state records show.

Heckert followed up by getting a protective order in Jackson County Circuit Court to limit defense lawyers from sharing the material.

State police were late again notifying the state certification agency that Allison had retired. State police were supposed to send a personnel form to the certification department within 10 days of his retirement. They sent it four months after the fact.

The form asked if Allison faced allegations of misconduct or uninvestigated complaints before his separation from the agency.

A state police major checked the “No” box.

SMYTH’S CASE

A similar hide-and-seek game played out with records in Smyth’s case.

The family of Robert Box, the Josephine County man shot by Smyth and another trooper on May 29, 2015, had sued state police and Smyth, alleging wrongful death and negligence. Smyth had trespassed on Box’s property and failed to develop a plan for how he and the other trooper would confront Box in response to a domestic violence call.

The family’s attorney asked for all of Smyth’s disciplinary records as part of pretrial discovery. But the files turned over to the family’s lawyers by state Justice Department lawyers defending the state police didn’t include all internal records related to Smyth’s lengthy history of problems on the job and discipline.

The Box family’s lawyers got the records only because, once again, of Harrison.

In his whistleblower suit against state police, Harrison and his lawyer convinced a federal judge to compel state police to share documents detailing Smyth’s discipline and poor decision-making, Allison’s racist language and a host of transgressions by others, including a trooper who failed to document his traffic stops and searches of vehicles for nine months and failed to account for drug evidence seized in two cases.

Attorney David Park, one of the two private lawyers suing Smyth and state police in state court, didn’t know records were missing until Harrison and his lawyer alerted him.

Park then issued subpoenas for the trove of documents that Harrison’s lawyer obtained. The state objected, and it took five and half months before Park got the court to allow him to use the full record of Smyth’s disciplinary history as evidence at the trial over his fatal shooting of the homeowner.

Among other things, the records showed internal investigations had found Smyth was unable to perform under stress, his conduct alarmed his SWAT colleagues and his use of force on vulnerable people was celebrated in the Central Point office.

He had been booted from SWAT in March 2015 — three months before he shot Box — after other troopers reported “liability concerns” about Smyth and warned that his “overreaction” has “the potential to lead to someone being seriously injured or killed,” the records revealed.

When Smyth returned to work after the Josephine County district attorney found no criminal wrongdoing in the Box shooting, Smyth broke down.

“Ive disinfected and cleaned all my gear but i cant open the gun box or envelopes with mags and bullets…im shaking like a damn leaf and cant bring myself to do it!! Is that bloody normal or what,” Smyth texted on July 7, 2015, to the senior trooper, according to the exchange.

The senior trooper told Smyth to put the gun away and try another day.

The next afternoon, Smyth sent another text to the trooper: This one sought Box’s handgun as a souvenir.

“Hey Tom do y think the bad guys .44magnum handgun will be destroyed or d u think Heather and I could have it cut lengthways and given a side each for memorial purposes? Just a thot,” Smyth wrote, referencing Trooper Heather West who also fired gunshots that day.

“No. That’s not going to happen,” the trooper responded.

The Box case was far from the first time Smyth’s actions came under scrutiny.

During another internal investigation, state police investigators had asked Smyth what he thought of the “satirical award” posted on a wall in the Central Point office.

The display featured a photo of him sitting in uniform in his personal car and celebrated him as a “well-rounded ass kicking commando” for racking up 16 use-of-force incidents against “suspects terrifying females children and elderly people.”

Asked if he was offended by the photo, Smyth said no, that he thought it was “absolutely hilarious,” according to a state police inspector’s report.

Smyth did not respond to phone or email messages seeking comment.

After both the family’s wrongful death lawsuit against Smyth and Harrison’s whistleblower lawsuit against state police settled, Park and Harrison’s lawyer Beth Creighton filed ethics complaints with the Oregon State Bar against two Justice Department lawyers, alleging they deliberately withheld damaging evidence about Smyth during legal discovery.

The Justice Department, in response, said there was no “obstruction” — simply “ordinary discovery disagreements” about the “scope and relevance of the troopers’ employment-related materials.”

The bar complaint has been referred for further investigation.

‘AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY’

Smyth remains on the job, moving last year from patrol to the detective division, a promotion. He’s now working in the state police Major Crimes Section, which investigates homicides, and among other things, police shootings involving state police and other law enforcement officers. He made $107,904 in 2022, the latest salary information available.

Harrison, who worked for state police for 25 years after three years as a cadet, retired in May 2022. To settle Harrison’s suit, state police paid him $290,000 and he received $185,000 more from workers compensation claims. State police admitted no wrongdoing.

He said he was passionate about his job but sued because his agency “withheld misconduct to avoid accountability.”

Costanzo, a 25-year state patrol veteran, retired last March and now works for a private company giving ethics courses about moral courage to police around the state. He had worked about five years as the state police ethics instructor.

He said no one in state police bothered to reach out to him after he submitted a written resignation, citing his general reason for resigning as the agency’s ethics instructor.

Shephard, who helped start the state police Inclusion Team and retired in 2020 after 26 years with the agency, lambasted Allison’s explanation for using the racist slur. “As a person of color, it is not slang at all,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

She said she suspects his racist language was allowed for so long because few Black officers work for state police, particularly in southern Oregon. There are currently seven Black state police troopers, representing about 1.1% of the agency’s sworn officers, according to state police.

“At no point should you allow a supervisor to do something that’s civilly and morally wrong. When you have shown publicly you have a bias, you are not fit for leadership,” she said. “That’s the sad part of law enforcement in some sense. They try to internally protect their own and not call out bad behavior when it’s necessary.’’

Smyth, who filed the initial complaint against Allison, told agency investigators why he hadn’t said anything earlier about Allison’s racist language.

“I was worried about, if I report it, I can kiss goodbye to my job because I’ll get retaliated against. … I truly believe that.”