Michigan police officer Bernadette Najor has been reinstated after cutting the hair off detained woman, Charda Gregory’s head in 2013.
According to the Huffington Post, Officer Najor has been admitted back to her suburban Detroit police force with full pay against the will of her department.
Najor’s attorney said that she was “completely exonerated” by an arbitrator and that she did not violate the terms of her employment contract.
Najor was fired last December after she cut the weave of then-22-year-old Gregory at the Warren jail. Gregory had been arrested Nov. 13, 2013 when she woke up in a hotel room without knowledge of how she’d gotten there and according to her lawyer she “flipped out,” believing she had been drugged. She was charged with trashing a hotel room and kicking through the window of the response police vehicle.
When she got to booking, she was “docile and cooperative,” Warren Police Deputy Commissioner Louis Galasso said in a previous interview.
Security footage of the altercation between the two women shows Najor hitting Gregory in the chest and pushing her into a seat. Several officers get Gregory into restraints, and then Najor spends several minutes cutting out Gregory’s weave.
An officer wrote up the incident, but Najor failed to file the additional paperwork required when police use force. According to local newspaper, The Macomb Daily, Najor testified during arbitration that she had been told she must remove anything not permanently attached to prisoners and that Gregory’s hair was “loosely tied in with loops.”
Najor’s lawyer and the police union have not responded to requests for additional comment. Warren police have expressed in a statement that the city, “strongly disagrees with the arbitrator’s decision.”
All charges against Gregory were dropped shortly following the incident.
Take a look at footage from the incident above.