GREENWOOD — An independent study found no evidence of racial bias in the Greenwood police Department's arrests and traffic stops, the department announced Friday.
The city hired North Carolina-based Dolan Consulting Group to evaluate police traffic stop and citation data last year after five Greenwood officers were caught trading obscene messages and racial slurs on city equipment.
Researchers found "weak and inconsistent evidence" of bias against Black drivers stopped by the five former officers — Sam Bowen, Elijah Allen, Jacob Hagist, Zane Hennig, and Tyler Kintzele.
Additionally, the researchers found no evidence of bias by the five officers in stops involving other racial and ethnic groups.
There is no evidence of racial or ethnic bias in the traffic stops made by Greenwood police as a whole, the study found. The data appears to show the opposite might be happening, the study found.
"We found evidence to suggest a small degree of hesitancy on the part of the rest of the officers to stop or cite drivers who were persons of color when compared to how they treated non-Hispanic white drivers," researchers wrote.
The department fired Bowen in October.
Allen resigned from the department in October. Hagist, Hennig and Kintzele resigned last August.
Two months after his resignation, Hennig died from an acute asthma attack on Oct. 8, 2023, according to the Johnson County Coroner's Office.
“None of the officers involved are still employed with us and we are looking forward to putting this behind us," Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said in an email to WRTV.
WRTV has asked Ison for additional comment, but in October the chief told WRTV the dismissal of the five officers sends a clear message.
"This isn't the culture of the Greenwood Police Department," Ison said. "We're not going to tolerate this type of behavior."
The department said the five officers used their in-car computers to trade messages that "contained, profanity, sexually explicit content, disrespectful/explicit comments concerning supervisors and pejorative racial and religious comments."
The messages included derogatory terms or slurs describing Black people, gay people and Jewish people, according to the department.
Bowen acknowledged making the comments during a hearing before the city's police merit board.
"It’s not anything I am proud of," Bowen said at the hearing last October. "I see that it was wrong. I see that I shouldn’t have said those things. I was dealing with stress and looking for a way to relieve it."
The merit board subsequently voted unanimously to fire Bowen.
Bowen sued Chief Ison last summer, claiming his First Amendment rights were violated when he was disciplined by the department for criticizing the chief and the department in comments he posted on Facebook.
That lawsuit, which is still pending in the U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, led to the discovery of the string of derogatory instant messages exchanged between Bowen and the other four officers.
A sixth officer linked to the probe, Officer Evan Painter, was suspended for five days without pay for violating department policies related to standards of conduct, information technology use and mobile data use.
More: Greenwood police officer facing termination for 'obscene' messages files lawsuit | Greenwood police officer terminated for ‘obscene’ messages | Greenwood PD hires consultant to determine if officers profiled any citizens
WRTV reporter Kara Kenny contributed to this story.
Contact WRTV reporter Vic Ryckaert at victor.ryckaert@wrtv.com or on X/Twitter: @vicryc.
