Officer Threatens to Arrest a Black FBI Agent Relaxing in the Park – Now It’s Costing Him $6 Million

The Seventeen-Strike Policy

It takes a special kind of institutional rot to watch an officer harass innocent citizens sixteen separate times and decide the solution is a seventeenth PowerPoint presentation. Yet, this was the operational standard of the Phoenix Police Department regarding Officer Travis Holloway. For nine years, Holloway treated the Fourth Amendment as a suggestion rather than a law, accumulating a personnel file that read less like a service record and more like a liability manifest. Seventeen formal complaints. Thirteen of them involving the harassment of Black individuals in public spaces. And every single time, the department’s response was not termination, but “training”—a bureaucratic euphemism for doing absolutely nothing while pretending to solve the problem.

On a Tuesday afternoon in November, the bill for that negligence finally came due, and it cost the taxpayers of Phoenix $5.3 million.

The victim of Holloway’s final act of stupidity was Darius Mitchell. Mitchell was not a criminal. He was not a suspect. He was a man sitting at a picnic table in Desert Ridge Park, eating a bag of chips and drinking water after a workout. He was also a fifteen-year veteran of the FBI’s Civil Rights Division, a man who had spent his entire career prosecuting the exact brand of badge-heavy tyranny Holloway practiced daily. The irony is almost too perfect: the predator, accustomed to hunting the vulnerable, accidentally tried to eat a dragon.

The encounter began with the kind of lazy, assumption-based policing that bad officers rely on. Holloway received a call—one of those vague, weaponized “suspicious person” reports from a resident uncomfortable with a Black man existing in a nice neighborhood. A competent officer would have observed the scene, seen a man eating lunch, and cleared the call. Holloway, however, saw an opportunity to assert dominance. He rolled up to the pavilion with the unearned swagger of a man who has never faced a consequence in his life.

“Hey man, what are you doing out here?” was his opening salvo. It wasn’t a greeting; it was an accusation. When Mitchell replied that he was simply relaxing, Holloway demanded identification. It was an unlawful order. Under Terry v. Ohio, police cannot demand ID without reasonable suspicion of a crime. Sitting on a bench is not a crime. Existing in a park is not a crime. But to Holloway, Mitchell’s refusal to submit to his authority was the crime.

“I’m not giving ID for sitting in a park,” Mitchell said, calm and legally accurate.

“Then stand up. I’m going to cuff you,” Holloway snapped, reaching for his restraints. “You’re refusing a lawful order.”

It is infuriating to watch an officer invoke the law while actively breaking it. Holloway was about to put hands on a federal agent for the “crime” of knowing his rights better than the cop harassing him. Mitchell stood up, not to surrender, but to end the farce. He pulled out his credentials.

“Lawful? Nah, man. You picked the wrong guy. FBI.”

The look on Holloway’s face should be framed and hung in the Phoenix PD training academy as a warning. It was the realization that his badge, usually a shield against accountability, had just crumbled. Mitchell wasn’t just a fed; he was a specialist in police misconduct. He proceeded to dismantle Holloway legally, on camera, explaining exactly how the officer had just violated the Constitution.

When the supervisors arrived, the full scope of the department’s failure was laid bare. Lieutenant Marcus Freeman reviewed the footage and finally did what should have been done years ago: he stripped Holloway of his badge and gun. But the indignation of the command staff rang hollow. They knew who Holloway was. They had the receipts. They had sent him to cultural competency training, implicit bias workshops, and constitutional policing seminars—sixteen in total. Holloway had attended them all, signed the sheets, and gone right back to the street to harass Black joggers, readers, and teenagers. The department had documented his bias thirteen times and chosen to keep him on the payroll until he targeted someone with the power to fight back.

The subsequent lawsuit was a slaughter. Mitchell’s attorneys argued that the Phoenix Police Department was liable not just for the stop, but for “deliberate indifference” to a pattern of misconduct. The evidence was overwhelming. You cannot claim to be a professional law enforcement agency when you allow an officer to treat public parks as his private hunting ground for nearly a decade. The $5.3 million settlement was a tax on cowardice—the price the city paid for refusing to fire a bad cop because it was administratively easier to just send him to another class.

Holloway was fired, his name added to the national decertification list, his career over. But that is a small comfort. The true tragedy is that it took a federal badge to stop him. If Darius Mitchell had been a teacher, a mechanic, or a nurse, he would have been handcuffed, booked, and given a criminal record for “resisting,” while Holloway would have been sent to his seventeenth training session. This case proved that in the eyes of the Phoenix Police Department, the rights of its citizens were theoretical, and accountability was only an option when the victim carried a bigger badge.