By REID TUCKER
DeFuniak Springs Police Sgt. Anthony Kaiser and officer Rick Boblitt were fired last week for the racial harassment of fellow officer Chuwan Boros.
The Wednesday, June 3, termination of Kaiser and Boblitt came after an internal affairs investigation conducted this April, but the alleged harassment of Boros, who is of Asian descent, goes back at least three years. The investigation sustained the allegations made by Boros that Kaiser, the supervisor of both Boblitt and Boros for approximately one-and-a-half years, had failed to take corrective or disciplinary action against Boblitt while also failing to report the incidents to command staff or human resources. Kaiser and Boblitt were veteran officers, having served five years and 16 years, respectively, on the force.
Though City Marshal Mark Weeks declined to make further comment on the matter in the days following the firing, the media release prepared by the DFSPD spelled out his position in no uncertain terms.
“The actions of these two former employees cannot and will not be tolerated at this agency,” Weeks said in the release. “It is of great concern to me that a veteran law enforcement officer would engage in any type of harassment of anyone. The supervisor in this case failed the system for not reporting and/or stopping the harassment.”
Boros requested a shift transfer in February of 2015, and he filed a formal complaint against Boblitt early this April, stating that he did not make a complaint sooner due to fear of retaliation from Kaiser and Boblitt. The ensuing internal affairs investigation began in mid April, with the final interview of many conducted with current and former DFSPD employees concluding toward the end of that month, the final report being submitted on June 1. The narrative presented in the documents obtained via public record request indicates that Boblitt had made racially charged comments about and to Boros regarding his ethnic background, sometimes in the presence of other police department employees, including Kaiser.
Opinion was divided among those interviewed as to whether Boblitt’s comments and actions, which ranged from name-calling to imitating Asian racial stereotypes in a mocking way, were received by Boros as being malicious at the time. Some police department employees interviewed noted that Boros sometimes “picked back” at Boblitt by calling him a “redneck” and similar things, when the latter made derogatory racial comments, while others said Boros left the room when this happened. Some interviewees didn’t know if Boros was genuinely upset by the comments, though others said Boros told them he was offended.
Boros himself wrote in the letter accompanying the record of the alleged harassment that Boblitt’s comments “violated [his] dignity and intimidated, degraded, humiliated and created a hostile work environment for [him].” In Boros’ selected timeline of the incidents of harassment, which began in August of 2012, he noted that Boblitt made racist comments to him in the presence of Capt. Michael Lolley in June of 2014 and near the office of Chief Weeks that September. Neither Lolley nor Weeks were interviewed as part of the investigation, at least as it is documented in the internal affairs files obtained through public records request.
However, Boblitt and Kaiser were interviewed. Boblitt admitted in the interviews that he had made some of the aforementioned comments to Boros, but that he had not made them with ill intent, describing Boros as his friend. Boblitt even said in an interview with Lolley that Boros had attended a birthday party at his house in recent months (though it is recorded that Boros said this was to avoid retaliation if he did not attend the party).
Similarly, the internal affairs file shows that Kaiser described the interactions between Boblitt and Boros as “friendly banter between co-workers” that never crossed the line into harassment. He stated that he would have taken the action had Boros complained to him or if he thought of the comments as constituting harassment.
Nevertheless, the documents obtained show the recommendation for the termination of Kaiser and Boblitt to be based on Boros’ perception of the racial comments and not on the intent with which they may have been delivered. The length of time during which the comments were made and not reported to command staff also factored into the recommendation for the pair’s firing.
“Racial comments made over an extended period of time constitutes harassment,” Lolley wrote in his report.
Due to the serious nature of this news story, multiple public records requests were made, and only some of them were ready in time for this week’s edition of the DeFuniak Herald. As such, this article will be the first of several relating to the termination of officers Kaiser and Boblitt.
