Columbia Daily Tribune columnist Bill Clark has been suspended indefinitely after publishing a scathing column against two Boone County Sheriff’s deputies in Missouri, according to Tribune managing editor Charles L. Westmoreland.
According to Clark’s original column, he was pulled over for failing to signal at a stop sign. In it, he said he’s “lucky I didn’t get shot,” and “my life seemed to be in danger.” He went on to say in the column that he now feels like he understands what minorities go through when stopped by police.
The day after Clark’s column was published, Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey read the column and “immediately began questioning Ol’ Clark’s claims.” He wrote in a response to the column that the Boone County Sheriff’s Department’s motto is “treat people like you would like your mother to be treated.”
“In the 12 and half years of being the Sheriff, I can count the number of formal complaints we have received on deputies on both hands and I don’t know that I would even need the second hand! So, something just didn’t add up,” he wrote.
Along with the Sheriff’s response is a dash cam video of the incident, which you can watch on the Boone County Sheriff’s Department website here. In the video, you can see Clark’s car roll through the stop sign and then turn right without a turn signal. The deputies’ car then seems to pull Clark’s car over, but Clark goes through an intersection first. The deputies’ car’s sirens go off briefly before Clark’s car stops, and then the deputies get out and what seems like a routine traffic violation stop.
Westmoreland — the managing editor of the Tribune — watched the video and concluded that Clark had conflated the experience. “I cannot defend Clark’s column or the facts as he presented them,” Westmoreland wrote in a column of his own responding to the debacle.
“In the video I saw two professional deputies performing their job by the book, and a somewhat confused and irritated motorist, unaware of what he had done to draw the attention of local law enforcement,” he continues. “It certainly wasn’t worth writing a scathing column about, and the Tribune should not have published it. For that I apologize to the Boone County Sheriff’s Department and readers who feel they were misled by Clark’s column.”
Clark’s columns will no longer appear in the Tribune until further review.