A civilian supervisor and former police sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Department was terminated two weeks ago, shortly after testifying in defense of an officer accused of inappropriate anal and genital searches, FOX 5 reports.

MPD told DCist that J.J. Brennan, a member of the major narcotics branch, is currently on “paid, administrative leave,” but would not say why, citing “personnel matters.”

The case is seemingly intertwined with the firing of another MPD officer, Sean Lojacono.

A viral video emerged of Lojacono performing an invasive search during a stop and frisk in September of 2017. In the footage, the man being searched, M.B. Cottingham, verbally protests several times as the officer sticks his fingers between Cottingham’s buttocks and grabs his genitals. The city eventually settled a civil case with Cottingham for an unknown sum.

MPD pulled Lojacono off the department’s gun recovery unit, then moved to fire him. The first day of testimony in the trial revealed that Lojacono was actually fired not for his search of Cottingham, but for a similar search of another man that was captured by police body cameras and took place about a half an hour later.

Lojacono is currently challenging his firing at a hearing in front of the MPD trial board. His defense is that he was simply searching suspects the way he was trained by other officers in the field. To that end, his defense brought in Brennan as an expert witness.

Lojacono’s attorney, Marc Wilhite, did not respond to a request for comment.

Brennan testified that Lojacono’s search was common practice, and just like the kinds of searches he instructed his officers to perform when he was a sergeant. The day after his testimony, Brennan was presented with a termination letter, according to FOX 5.

“He did [the search] properly, did it back to front and nothing was there,” Brennan said in court according to WUSA9. “I always told people that worked for me, ‘Don’t be afraid to go up in the crotch.’ A lot of people who are searched complain about that being too intrusive. A lot of the people who complain about that being too intrusive have something up there.”

Brennan said he had instructed his officers to perform pat-downs this way even though he knew that it was technically against policy to perform this kind of search without placing someone under arrest and notifying them why they are being arrested, WUSA9 reports.

“You watch, ‘Cops’ on TV, 99 percent of the time they don’t tell them what they are under arrest for, so no, we don’t have to tell them what they were under arrest for. The Police Academy and the streets are two different places. Once you are out in the streets, you are in the real world,” Brennan testified.

The next day, Brennan’s commander delivered him a letter terminating him from the department, according to FOX 5. The letter quoted Brennan’s testimony, in particular his statements about not being “afraid to go up in the crotch,” and said the commander no longer trusted Brennan to manage officers on the narcotics team, FOX 5 reports. Brennan told the outlet that he is “bitter and angry” about his firing.

Scott Michelman of the D.C. ACLU, which helped Cottingham sue MPD for the invasive search by Lojacono last year, says that Brennan’s testimony at the hearing is evidence of widespread unconstitutional search practices at the department.

“This is something that sounds like it’s pervasive at the department,” Michelman says. “If MPD thinks they can erase that by firing one person, I think they’re taking what seems like a very superficial approach to a deep-seated problem.”

Previously:
ACLU Files Suit Against MPD Officer Over ‘Highly Intrusive’ Search
D.C. Police Reach Settlement With Man Over ‘Invasive’ Public Stop And Frisk
MPD Officer Fired For An Invasive Stop And Frisk Was Investigated For Another Search