Former Tacoma, Washington, officer Christopher Burbank, who was cleared of any wrongdoing in Manuel Ellis’ violent death, resigned from his new post as a sheriff’s deputy just a few days after he was hired.
Burbank was sworn in on April 1 as a lateral patrol deputy with the sheriff’s office in Thurston County, located about 40 miles outside of Tacoma where Ellis died. After posting about Burbank’s hiring on Facebook, several people blasted the office’s decision, which Sheriff Derek Sanders firmly defended online.
One Reddit user started a thread questioning the office’s hiring decision, which received more than 4,000 upvotes and 1,000 comments.
Sanders commented under that post that Burbank spent two months with investigators who combed through “every aspect of his personal and professional life.”
“Burbank has no other discipline outside of a few fender bender collisions. People feel very strongly on both sides of this issue, and it certainly isn’t hard to understand why. I suppose the larger scope of my concern is how many different layers have to weigh in that someone is innocent before they are deemed as such?” Sanders wrote.
“Burbank has been cleared at so many different levels, including the one that matters most: a trial before his peers. We can say definitively based on the local prosecutor review, the initial investigation, the evidence of the case, the follow up investigation, the jury decision, the polygraph examination, and background investigation that Burbank did not commit a crime.”
Despite his lengthy defense, it wasn’t enough to mitigate the overwhelming criticism.
“This isn’t a good look Sheriff. I understand that the department is understaffed, but it is much better to have understaffing then a rogue cop on the force,” wrote one Reddit user.
“It should be readily evident that this is an individual that is not trusted by a noteworthy portion of the population,” another…
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