The Long Beach Police Department fired a longtime police officer in 2017 after a supervisor accused him of blowing off a domestic violence investigation without bothering to find the victim who’d left a trail of blood leading from an apartment.
For years, former officer Shawn Sheffield has disputed those accusations, arguing the supervisor made faulty assumptions about what was going on, but on Friday, a judge upheld the decision to fire Sheffield, a seven-year LBPD veteran.
Judge Mark C. Kim said it was “difficult to understand” Sheffield’s actions in April 2016 when he closed the apartment’s door, picked up a bloody knife on the driveway and placed it back inside through a broken window.
In internal affairs interviews, other officers at the scene expressed similar bafflement, according to court documents.
One testified that Sheffield, who was leading the investigation, said “No victim, no suspect,” as he closed the door to the blood-splattered apartment where there’d clearly been some kind of struggle.
When an LBPD sergeant arrived at the scene, he ordered officers back to work and hopped a nearby wall where he found the victim bleeding from the head, according to court documents.
When the Long Beach Civil Service commission reviewed Sheffield’s firing, the sergeant testified “that the officers had ‘given up’ once they followed the blood trail to the wall.”
The Civil Service Commission is Long Beach’s final authority on whether employees are fired. After being terminated by the LBPD, Sheffield appealed to the commission. He argued in part that he was unfairly targeted and the only one on the case who received any discipline.
In 2018, the commission upheld his dismissal, prompting Sheffield to appeal its decision one step further, landing the case in a Long Beach courtroom on Friday.
In front of the judge, attorney James Trott argued the sergeant was mistaken about Sheffield blowing off the call.
Trott, who represents members of the Long Beach Police Officers Association, said police were frantically looking for the victim that night, but the group—including Sheffield, who has a back injury—simply decided to go around the wall instead of hopping over it. At the same time, they were trying to track down a car they thought was related to the investigation.
When they came up empty, the sergeant misinterpreted what was going on because he arrived as the officers were walking toward the front of the apartment complex, according to Trott.
In the end, police found the victim and arrested the woman he was dating on suspicion of attacking him, according to court papers.
Much of Friday’s arguments in court focused on the Civil Service Commission’s conclusion that Sheffield was untruthful with internal affairs investigators.
They cited inconsistencies and contradictions in Sheffield’s testimony about the exact timing of events.
Trott said Sheffield admitted he’d moved the knife, something he said was a mistake but didn’t warrant being fired.
Because he admitted his error, Sheffield had no reason to lie about what happened, according to Trott. He argued the inconsistencies in his story were understandable considering investigators were asking him about something that had happened months earlier.
Nevertheless, based on all the evidence, Kim upheld the commission’s decision, saying there was no clear indication it abused its power in firing Sheffield.