"He was refusing to turn around." Voss pointed to the written sentence. "Your report doesn't say he refused a command. It says he moved toward you. Would you like to correct that?"
His attorney requested a brief private consultation. Voss paused the recording and left the room. Through the glass she could see Morrow lean toward Puit, speaking with the tired intensity of someone trying to stop a man from making a bad situation worse. Whatever advice was given, Puit did not return with a revised account. He said only that he would not answer further questions without reviewing all available records with counsel.
Voss ended the interview and documented the refusal neutrally. She did not need a confession to compare a video with a report, and she knew that pressing for one might create more procedural trouble than useful information. The footage, the computer logs, and the independent witnesses would have to carry their own weight. She copied her preliminary findings to a secured file and requested expanded access to the prior complaint records.
The first file belonged to Henry Calder, a fifty-six-year-old city bus mechanic who had been walking from an evening shift when Puit stopped him outside a closed grocery store. Henry had a shop uniform with a company patch, a lunch container, and a bus pass. Puit claimed Henry matched the vague description of a man suspected of tampering with vehicles in a parking lot. The description was never entered in a report because no related complaint could be found.
Henry had asked why he was being detained and had received an order to place his hands against a brick wall. When he turned his head to ask whether someone could call his wife, Puit pushed him harder into the surface. Henry later reported bruising and a persistent soreness in his shoulder. He submitted a complaint with photographs and a signed statement from the coworker who had watched from across the street, but the coworker was never formally interviewed. The file was closed because the department claimed independent corroboration was unavailable.
The second complaint came from Malik Patterson, then twenty-seven, an electrician working on a renovated office building near East Garland. Puit encountered him leaving the site after sunset with tools in his own truck. He questioned Malik about why he was on the premises, demanded identification, and held him beside the patrol car while another officer checked the building. Malik's supervisor confirmed by telephone that he was authorized to be there, but Puit continued questioning him about an unrelated burglary that had occurred miles away.
Malik had filed a complaint after the stop cost him an evening job and his supervisor began treating him as a possible liability. The administrative report described the interaction as a routine preventive inquiry and suggested that the complainant had misunderstood the officer's tone. The stop had never produced charges, an arrest, or even a documented offense. Malik's complaint received the same final disposition as Henry's: no sustained violation.