Gallagher had answered yes. Saying it aloud made him feel as though he had taken the first step off a cliff. Megan did not tell him everything would be all right or that he was a good man trapped by a bad boss. She told him to get legal advice, tell the truth, and stop trying to save a career by concealing the very things that were destroying his ability to live with himself.
He arrived at Porter's interview with a lawyer he had retained that morning. The decision disappointed a part of him that wanted to demonstrate complete openness, but the lawyer had explained that cooperation did not require giving up basic protections. Porter respected the choice and began by telling him the interview was voluntary, recorded, and likely to become part of both a disciplinary review and a criminal investigation. She made no promise of immunity or a guaranteed outcome.
"Deputy Gallagher," she said, "I need you to describe what you personally saw, what you personally did, and what Sergeant Hollister instructed you to do. I do not want your guesses about his state of mind." Gallagher looked down at the legal pad in front of him and replied that he understood. His attorney nodded for him to continue.
For the first several minutes, Gallagher described routine training. Hollister had taught him how to position a cruiser safely, approach vehicles while watching occupants' hands, request backup, and inventory property. Those details were ordinary enough that he almost relaxed while discussing them. Then Porter asked when the instruction had shifted from lawful highway enforcement to choosing drivers based on race.
Gallagher's shoulders rose. "First week," he said. He described Hollister telling him to look for out-of-state plates and Black or Latino drivers, especially when the car was either unusually expensive or visibly worn. "He said one way meant drug money and the other meant drug money, too. There wasn't a way for those drivers to look right."
Porter asked whether those directions had ever appeared in written policy. Gallagher shook his head. "He wasn't foolish enough to put it on paper. He talked like it was experience, like knowing how to spot trouble was a secret older deputies passed down." Gallagher remembered trying to ask whether the criteria were backed by actual intelligence reports, only to be told he was too new to understand the highway.
He described the unofficial scorekeeping folder Hollister kept in his cruiser. Inside its cover, the sergeant wrote seizure amounts beside dates and initials, then calculated monthly totals as though he were tracking sales commissions. When a month produced less money than the previous one, Hollister complained about the quality of the traffic and instructed deputies to stay out longer. Gallagher recalled one evening when the sergeant called a small seizure a waste of a perfectly good traffic stop.