“No access to Dr. Shaw’s raw testing.”
“Absolutely not.”
After the call, Malcolm sat quietly for a moment.
He felt relief.
And disappointment.
A very human part of him wanted to be the person who wrote the final sentence on Prescott.
Unfit.
Remove badge.
End of story.
That was exactly why he should not be allowed to.
Accountability without process was merely another form of power.
Three weeks later, Dr. Eleanor Shaw completed her evaluation.
Her report did not diagnose Prescott as racist.
There was no accepted clinical test that could reduce a complex pattern of bias into a simple medical label.
Instead, she examined fitness-relevant behavior.
Judgment under interpersonal challenge.
Emotional regulation.
Response to criticism.
Ability to recognize errors.
Rigid versus flexible thinking.
Capacity to distinguish disrespect from threat.
She reviewed selected body-camera clips, disciplinary records, supervisor input, Prescott’s interview, standardized measures, and his own explanation of events.
Her conclusion was narrower than the public would later imagine.
Prescott displayed significant defensiveness, limited insight into how personal assumptions influenced discretionary policing, difficulty accepting corrective feedback, and a recurring tendency to interpret noncompliance or questioning as personal challenge.
She recommended that he not return to unrestricted enforcement duties unless the department could demonstrate successful remediation and a structured reevaluation.
That report did not fire Prescott.
It became one part of the case.
The department also had policy findings.
Improper detention.
Inaccurate articulation of investigative basis.
Failure to de-escalate.
Unprofessional conduct.
Concerns regarding discriminatory enforcement supported by broader data analysis.
Then the civilian oversight board became involved.
Malcolm filed a separate complaint not only about Prescott, but about the earlier complaints that had apparently gone nowhere.
His letter was three pages.
No emotional language.
No demand that anyone be fired.
He asked four questions.
Why had the two earlier complaints not triggered review of stop data?
Did supervisors receive racial-disparity reports for discretionary encounters?
What safeguards existed to identify officers whose self-initiated contacts disproportionately affected particular groups?
And who was responsible for recognizing patterns spread across different complaint files?
The board opened a precinct-level review.
That was when the story became bigger than Nolan Prescott.
Precinct 12 covered one of the city’s most economically divided districts.
On one side were riverfront apartments, hospitals, restaurants, renovated townhouses, and parks.
Less than two miles away were blocks with higher poverty, more calls for violence, and far heavier police presence.
Officers moved between those environments every shift.
The review board did not simply compare racial stop percentages to overall city demographics.
They examined where officers were assigned.
Why contact occurred.
Whether the contact was dispatched.
Whether officers recorded reasonable suspicion.
Whether searches occurred.
What was found.
Whether force was used.
Whether supervisors reviewed the encounters.
The findings were uncomfortable.
Prescott was an extreme example.
He was not the only one.
Several officers showed similar, though less pronounced, patterns in self-initiated encounters involving Black men.
The larger problem was supervisory.
Managers rewarded activity totals but rarely examined quality.
A high number of stops could be praised as productivity even when few produced enforcement outcomes.
Complaint files were reviewed one at a time.
Data systems did not automatically flag racial disparities in discretionary contacts.
Sergeants signed reports for legal sufficiency but did not consistently ask why an officer repeatedly used vague phrases like “furtive conduct” or “appeared out of place.”
One supervisor told investigators:
“We were looking for misconduct incidents. We weren’t looking for patterns that hadn’t become incidents yet.”
That sentence appeared on page thirty-one of the final report.
The report was 146 pages.
It criticized the precinct.
It also rejected the idea that every officer there engaged in racial profiling.
Some officers had stop patterns closely aligned with calls for service and documented violations.
Several had intervened constructively when colleagues became unnecessarily confrontational.
The board highlighted those examples deliberately.
Reform, Malcolm believed, became dishonest when it painted everyone with the same brush.
The department announced Prescott’s termination twenty-eight days after the investigation opened.
The official letter cited sustained findings of improper detention, misleading justification for the encounter, repeated failures of professional judgment, a documented pattern of discretionary enforcement disparities, and fitness concerns identified through independent evaluation.
Malcolm read the letter only after it became public record.