308. The Chief

Matthew Luckhurst gave a homeless man a sandwich.

The sandwich contained dog waste.

He was a police officer at the time. He was fired.

(I want to be precise about the sequence: a police officer prepared or obtained a sandwich, replaced or supplemented its contents with dog waste, and gave it to a homeless man to eat. This is not a misunderstanding. The waste was inside the sandwich. The sandwich was handed to a person. The person ate it, or attempted to eat it, or both. The officer was then terminated from his employment.)

Matthew Luckhurst was then hired by another department. He was fired again.

He is now the police chief of Benavides, Texas.

I want to sit with the phrase "police chief" for a moment. Police chief is a leadership position. It involves supervising officers and setting the standards by which those officers conduct themselves in the community they serve. The person who holds the position of police chief is, in most systems, responsible for the culture of the department.

Benavides is a city in Duval County, Texas. It has a police department. The police department has a chief. The chief is Matthew Luckhurst.

He was fired from a position that required him not to give homeless people sandwiches containing dog waste. He was then fired from a second position. He is now in charge of other people who are in positions that require them not to do things like that.

This is the system working. The system did not fail to fire him. It fired him twice. The question of what the system did after that is a separate question from the question of how many times it fired him. The answer to the second question is two. The answer to the first question is: appointed him chief of police.

Matthew Luckhurst did not comment for this piece. He is, presumably, busy.