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Navarro College, located in Corsicana, Texas, gained recognition after being featured in the Netflix series, Cheer. However, the institution is now facing a civil lawsuit after a former Black football player claimed a campus police officer racially profiled him.
In the suit, Michael Police stated that Navarro College officer David Arnett had racially profiled him and another friend after they were accused of smoking marijuana at an off-campus apartment complex in March 2020, the Chron reported
.Police initially filed the complaint in March in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. His attorneys argued against Arnett’s assumption that two Black students were doing drugs, stating that their client was smoking a Black n’ Mild cigar at the time. They also said the officer violated Fourth Amendment laws and in “no good faith, reasonable, non-racial profiling or justifiable law enforcement reason whatsoever” to detain Police for possible drug usage.
The attorneys said in the suit that Arnett initiated a search outside campus jurisdiction by searching Police for traces of marijuana. However, during a pat-down, the officer allegedly found “a clear empty cylindrical tube” in Police’s back pocket. Arnett claimed that he could “smell a faint odor of marijuana emanating from the tube but admittedly did not find any residue in or around the tube,” the lawsuit read.
Police informed Arnett that the tube was used to store a CBD cigarette. According to Texas law, CBD and hemp products are legal in the state, as long as they’re produced in another location.
“The Legislature required that the Department’s rules must reflect the principle that ‘the processing or manufacturing of a consumable hemp product for smoking is prohibited,’ but did not mention retail sale,” a court document obtained from Marijuana Moment stated.
“Nevertheless, the Department adopted a rule that banned not only the processing and manufacturing of consumable hemp products for smoking but also the distributing and retail sale of such products.”
While Arnett’s search was deemed illegal, Police was charged with possessing drug paraphernalia, a class C misdemeanor in Texas. He was later acquitted of all charges by a Navarro County jury back in March.
In the court documents, Police and his attorneys said the officer “has a history of targeting and harassing African American male students at Navarro College with accusations, arrests, searches, and/or detentions [for] alleged criminal conduct” while employed for the Navarro College police department.
Arnett’s attorneys responded to the complaint by requesting for the case to be dismissed, the court documents read.
Though Police was not the only Black student who was a racial profiling victim, his lawsuit represented the other students whom Arnett targeted.
“I’m not the first person this has happened to at Navarro. I’m just the first one that fought it,” he said.