Nick Hogan was such an abusive douche of a cop that not even his fellow officers liked him, calling for his termination last year after it was discovered he was having an affair with one of their wives.
So it is unlikely they are bothered by the fact that the Washington cop was sentenced to nine months in jail Tuesday for pepper spraying a man who was restrained in a gurney inside a hospital in 2011.
Hogan, who was a Tukwila cop at the time, claimed the restrained victim had “triggered his threat response” by taunting him after Hogan had delivered three “knee strikes” to his head before shoving and tackling him inside the hospital, prompting protests from hospital staff.
But his superiors did not buy that excuse, asking Hogan why didn’t he just walk away from the man who was physically unable to hurt him considering he was strapped to a gurney, according to the Seattle Times.
Hogan, who had already cost the city of Tukwila $425,000 in previous excessive force lawsuits, including one where he purposely broke a man’s ankle, then forced him to walk on it, was fired in 2012 for the pepper spraying incident.
But he then landed a job 30 minutes away with the Snoqualmie Police Department despite the fact that his well-publicized history of abuse against African-American men led to his application being rejected by several other agencies, including the Seattle Police Department.
Even his fellow cops at the Tukwila Police Department, who are also known to be abusive, said they did not like working with him because he had a tendency to escalate situations.
And it didn’t take long for his abusive tactics to surface at the Snoqualmie Police Department where he ended up placed on paid administrative leave four times for different abuse incidents, costing taxpayers almost $35,000 for his paid vacations.
But it was not until it was discovered he was having an affair with the wife of a fellow cop at the Snoqualmie Police Department that resulted in him being placed on unpaid suspension for 20 days in January 2016.
That was when 18 of the department’s 21 police officers signed a letter asking him to be fired.
The letter stated the following, according to a March 2016 Seattle Times article:
“When Officer Hogan came to work with the department for his initial field training, some Officers found him difficult to train, abrasive with citizens, discourteous to fellow officers, routinely disregarded case law, and generally a liability to the city.
“We expressed these concerns to management and were ignored and told to allow him to continue,” the letter said.
Once on his own, the letter said, Hogan was “heavy handed, disrespectful and inappropriate to members of the public” and his fellow officers.
That letter expressed similar sentiments expressed by fellow officers from the Tukwila Police Department a few years earlier as reported by the Seattle Times in October 2015.
In June 2011, Tukwila Assistant Chief Don Lincoln wrote in a memorandum to Chief Mike Villa that Hogan had displayed a “disturbing pattern” of serious use-of-force abuses, often involving intoxicated African-American men.
Hogan was also found to have an “apparent affiliation” with a sometimes violent anti-drug movement known as “Straight Edge” — he had a large Straight-Edge themed tattoo on his torso — and had posted inflammatory lyrics celebrating police brutality on an X-Box homepage: “They could use you, you got no remorse; they could use you on the police force. You’d be cute all dressed in blue. You could brutalize right on cue. You’d abuse those who are weak, of course.”
In his squad-room locker, his supervisor found what was described by Lincoln as a “trophy binder,” containing copies of reports in which Hogan had used force.
Some of his colleagues said they cringed when Hogan responded as backup to their calls, believing his presence increased the likelihood that they’d have to fight their way out of what had been a calm situation.
“I would constantly dread every call that I went to with Officer Hogan as I believed that he would cause it to be needlessly stressful and chaotic due to his abrasive and overtly aggressive behavior,” Officer Zack Anderson wrote in a memo to Chief Villa in a July 2011 statement ordered as part of an internal investigation.
So without the support of the Brothers in Blue – which is usually extended for the most arrogant and abusive cops – it did not look good for Hogan when he was indicted by a grand jury last year for the 2011 pepper spraying incident while he was a Tukwila police officer.
Nevertheless, he was still allowed to cop a plea deal that reduced his charge from a felony to a misdemeanor charge of deprivation of rights under color of law on the condition that he would not work as a cop or a security guard ever again since apparently jail sentences are not enough to disqualify applicants in the law enforcement field.
Like most abusive cops who end up convicted, Hogan turned meek in court, asking in a soft voice for leniency because his abusive behavior had “already cost me about everything.”
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