In the summer of 2022, 33-year-old Marcellis Blackwell graduated from the police academy at Lincoln University to more public fanfare than the average police cadet.
Blackwell was a part of the fourth class at the Missouri state university's police academy, the first of its kind at a historically Black university. It had been established as a way to bring more people of color into the ranks of policing, an ethos that Blackwell himself spoke to when he was interviewed about his time in the academy a few months before graduating.
He told the Jefferson City CBS affiliate that growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the police force was 90 to 95 percent white and he never saw officers who looked like him. It was that disparity that motivated him to get into law enforcement.
"It's an opportunity to address the quality of life issues in the Black community," Blackwell added. "It's an opportunity to be a part of the change."
After graduation, Blackwell got hired as an officer in the North County Police Cooperative, an entity established in 2015 that serves eight small municipalities in north St. Louis County. He started walking a beat on the last day of May 2022.
Within a year's time, Blackwell would again be in the headlines for his work as a cop. This time, it wasn't good.
On June 3, Blackwell allegedly arrested a man for unlawful possession of a weapon and driving with a revoked license. Blackwell handcuffed him and drove him to the Normandy High School bus lot. While the man was still handcuffed, Blackwell fondled him for an extended period of time "under the auspices of searching him again." Blackwell filmed at least a portion of the assault and at one point put his cell phone down the man's pants. He pulled the man's penis and stroked it. The assault went on for approximately 10 minutes, after which Blackwell took the man to jail and acted as if everything about the arrest had been normal.
In the months that followed, it would become clear the sexual assault was not an isolated incident. Blackwell's phone showed numerous other videos he'd taken of himself fondling arrestees — suggesting a serial predator abusing the power of the badge to terrorize the very community he'd once told the TV reporter he wanted to help.
A 2019 nationwide survey found that about three out of four law enforcement agencies reported difficulty recruiting qualified candidates to fill their ranks, and roughly the same number said that attracting quality personnel had gotten more difficult in the last five years.
The reasons behind the difficulties are complex. Some are not at all specific to policing. The report, compiled by the International Association of Police Chiefs, says that one contributor was that the generation entering the workforce tends to want the sort of work-life balance that policing is ill-equipped to provide. "Other shifts in U.S. culture, such as student loan debt, child care challenges for complex schedules, and the need for double incomes makes police work a stressful occupation for families today," the report says.
Then there are the policing-specific factors, particularly the changing public attitudes about the profession. A Gallup poll taken earlier this year found that only 43 percent of Americans have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of trust in the police, an erosion of confidence in the institution that has made fewer people interested in becoming officers.
"Policing took a real shot after Ferguson," says Tim Maher, a former police officer and professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis whose research focuses on policing.
Maher says that when the policing labor market tightened, it was the small, underfunded departments that bore the brunt of the squeeze, an effect that was particularly potent locally.
"St. Louis is a unique environment in that we have so many small municipalities, and that creates a problem, in that they're all vying for the same people," says Maher.
He adds, "Sometimes they tend to lower the bar a little bit."
It wasn't just Blackwell who took advantage of that. Take, for instance, the high profile case of Eddie Boyd III.
About a 12-minute drive from the parking lot where Blackwell allegedly stopped to assault one of the men he'd arrested is the headquarters for the Berkeley Police Department. That department, which serves Berkeley's 8,100 residents, currently employs Boyd, an officer whose résumé might as well be printed on a giant red flag.
As a city cop, Boyd was twice investigated by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department stemming from complaints about his behavior by parents of young people he interacted with in 2004 and 2005. He was cleared of wrongdoing in both cases, but baggage has continued to build up since then. In 2006, Boyd began to argue with a 12-year-old girl walking home from school, and when the girl's brother tried to intervene, Boyd tackled him and then struck the girl in the head with a gun. Boyd's punishment: a demotion.
In 2007, in the Ville neighborhood, the newly demoted Boyd was responding to a call about a fight at Sumner High School when he came upon freshman Christopher Dixon. Dixon later said in a lawsuit that Boyd approached with his gun drawn, positioned in such a way that the officer looked like he was either going to shoot him or strike him with it. Boyd hit Dixon in the face with the weapon.
"I just saw blood pouring from my face," Dixon said in a deposition. "Then I remember being grabbed and drug by my hood to the middle of the street." Other officers took Dixon to the hospital, then strangely to an Applebee's before dropping him off in a cell at juvenile detention.
St. Louis Police settled with Dixon for $35,000, but Boyd emerged victorious in the lawsuit stemming from the incident — and that was enough to allow him to remain a cop.
And when Boyd later left the St. Louis Police, he said in a 2009 deposition he worked for St. Ann's police department before finding a job with the Ferguson Police Department. There, his conduct as an officer drew at least four lawsuits and accusations he'd done everything from pull his gun on a Navy veteran cooling off in his car after a game of pick-up basketball to arresting a father for child neglect because the dad had the audacity to let his two-year-old son pee behind bushes at a park.
One commonality among the lawsuits Boyd drew in Ferguson is that he allegedly grew irate when faced with even the slightest pushback from people he was stopping. In one case, a man who wasn't the driver of a car Boyd pulled over allegedly asked why Boyd needed to see his identification. The man put this question to Boyd as he was reaching into his wallet to hand Boyd an ID — yet Boyd arrested the man for failure to comply.
Boyd was employed with Ferguson until as recently as 2019. He filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the municipality alleging racial discrimination — only to take the job in Berkeley, which has a police department about half the size of Ferguson's.
There's no way the Berkeley department wasn't aware of Boyd. He has one of the highest media profiles and most robust Google results page of any officer in town. The CBS Mornings national news program did a segment about him. He's been featured, unfavorably, in NPR, PBS and New York Magazine. The national coverage held Boyd up as indicative of what was then called the "Gypsy cop" phenomenon, a catch-all term for officers who behaved badly in one jurisdiction, got fired and then quickly found work with another department, only to begin the bad policing all over again.
Boyd landed his new job even after all that media coverage.
"I wish I could say I was shocked that another crooked police officer was able to get hired at another local police department. But this is the norm," says attorney Javad Khazaeli, who has represented numerous people in lawsuits against Boyd and the Ferguson Police Department. Khazaeli previously likened Boyd's capriciously authoritarian nature to that of South Park's Eric Cartman.
It may come as a surprise to many that — at least according to a 2017 study done by the Pew Research Center — police officers at large would agree with Khazaeli's lack of surprise. The Pew survey of more than 8,000 police officers found that almost three out of four disagreed with the notion that "officers who consistently do a poor job are held accountable."
Berkeley Police Chief Art Jackson did not respond to multiple messages inquiring about Boyd's hiring.
Maher, the criminology professor, says that the extent to which a department can be choosy about who they hire changes when the number of applicants drops precipitously.
"When many agencies are having trouble recruiting people, it's the smaller agencies — which tend in many cases to pay less, offer less benefits — they're even struggling more," he says.
"When there's fewer applicants to choose from, and you need bodies on the street, some of these agencies might take a little bit more of a chance on somebody than they would have in the past."
Marcellis Blackwell got busted because his victim in June had the temerity to come forward: The man told other officers in the North County Police Cooperative what had happened.
When it comes to investigating and prosecuting police officers, the wheels of justice don't always turn swiftly. Given how fast things moved against Blackwell, it's not unreasonable to suspect others in the department may have already been wary of him. Officers located surveillance video from a business near Normandy High which showed the unwarranted stop Blackwell made with his detainee there. Four days after the initial complaint, Blackwell was placed under arrest.
After they took Blackwell into custody, officers confiscated his personal cell phone. A search revealed videos of the June 3 assault as well as numerous other similar videos Blackwell had made during other stops.
Blackwell's arrest and the two felony charges brought against him for sodomy and kidnapping received widespread local coverage. That media attention brought many other victims out of the woodwork.
One of those victims was a man identified in court documents only as RM. In December 2022, prosecutors allege Blackwell placed RM under arrest and then took him to an undisclosed "isolated location." There, while the man was handcuffed, Blackwell allegedly sexually assaulted him before taking him to jail.
Once in jail, Blackwell continued to visit the man, allegedly to intimidate him into silence. After RM bonded out, he had a court date in Illinois on unrelated charges. Blackwell showed up to the court in Illinois and took video of the man, which investigators later found on Blackwell's phone. Prosecutors wrote in court filings that "there was no reason, other than intimidation, for him to be present." Blackwell also told RM that if he didn't keep his mouth shut, his wife would be charged with a crime.
Blackwell was charged in September with sexually assaulting eight men he detained in what were functional kidnappings. Because he was acting "under color of law" — meaning he committed the crimes in his capacity as a police officer — he's facing 16 counts of felony civil rights violations and 5 additional counts of falsifying records.
There are likely more victims — and more potential charges — beyond the eight currently known, prosecutors say. The search of Blackwell's phone turned up photos of additional victims who are as of yet unidentified.
Prosecutors also included in their court filings the intriguing detail that, until 2013, Blackwell went by the name of Willis Green Overstreet. Naturally, many wondered what sort of trouble he'd gotten into before becoming a cop in 2022, and if the North County Co-op should have ever hired him at all.
Major Ron Martin with the North County Police Cooperative tells the RFT he can't comment on Blackwell beyond the statement they issued upon his initial arrest in June. That statement called the charges against Blackwell "massively disheartening" and said he'd be held accountable for his actions. It also pointed out — rightfully — that it was the cooperative that launched the investigation into Blackwell that led to both the state and federal charges.
However, the statement doesn't say anything about whether the police cooperative knew about questionable items in the public record at the time of Blackwell's hire, which include Blackwell's wages being garnished in Indiana, judgments against him after he repeatedly failed to appear in court after being sued, or the almost $20,000 insurance bill he's accused of never paying on behalf of his company, One Stop Transportation.
All that goes back to Blackwell's background before he came to Lincoln University to study policing — and people who knew him then have plenty to say about him (see sidebar, "Marcellis Blackwell's Past Raises More Questions Than Answers").
One of them, Jill Paris, believes Blackwell swindled her father's insurance agency. Seeing Blackwell's mugshot after his arrest this fall made Paris relive the anger of what he did to her father's agency.
"To find out that he was hired on by any police force is complete negligence," she says. "Anyone and everyone who knows anything about people should have just Googled him."
To her point, the litigation stemming from the insurance shenanigans led not only to a record of Blackwell's wage garnishment but also numerous recorded instances of failing to appear in court. Those results aren't on Google, per se, but they are on the open internet via the website for the Indiana circuit courts.
Maher says things like failures to appear should be looked into very carefully when officers are being hired.
"Police departments ought to look into civil matters as well," he says. "You don't want to hire somebody with a bunch of baggage, with judgments against them, because, at the very least, that could cause some problems with his employment and would detract from their desirability of having them be a police officer."
Despite accruing some serious baggage — as well as a robust collection of Google search results — William Olsten had no trouble getting police work after leaving the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
"Incredible policeman," says St. Ann police chief Aaron Jimenez, who hired him most recently.
In 2019, Olsten had been on St. Louis city's police force for a decade when he and another officer were charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action for shooting a patron outside Bomber O'Brien's bar in south city. According to a police probable cause statement and media coverage at the time, a 22-year-old celebrating his birthday was sitting in his van by himself in the bar's parking lot when Olsten and the other officer, Joseph Schmitt, approached.
The two officers had been in the bar drinking. According to the birthday boy's dad, spilled drinks inside the bar may have set off a disagreement.
Schmitt went up to the side of the van, gun drawn. Olsten opened the van's door and let himself in.
The patron fled the vehicle, his own gun in hand. Olsten then shoved him to the ground, seemingly without provocation, and the patron's gun went off, a bullet striking Olsten. Schmitt then opened fire, wounding the patron. Shockingly, the police applied for charges against the 22-year-old patron, which prosecutors refused. They elected instead to charge Olsten and Schmitt.
Then, in 2019, Olsten was charged with pepper-spraying without provocation three people at a police protest. One of those people was in a wheelchair; another was current city Alderman Rasheen Aldridge. A civil suit against Olsten stemming from the incident is still ongoing.
In December 2019, a judge tossed out the charges related to the Bomber O'Brien's incident, taking the circuit attorney's office to task for "willfully" not turning over evidence to defense.
The assault charges stemming from the use of pepper spray went to a bench trial in 2021. Judge Thomas Clark found Olsten not guilty, writing, "While regrettable, unfortunate and concerning that the complaining witnesses experienced the unpleasant effects of the chemicals disbursed from Defendant's mace canister ... Defendant's actions were justified under the circumstances."
By then, Olsten was no longer a police officer. At least not with St. Louis city.
In a deposition related to the civil suit against him, Olsten acknowledged that in January 2019, while still on the force and about a week and a half prior to his indictment for the Bomber O'Brien incident, he flunked a random Breathalyzer test on the job, blowing a .062 not long after starting his shift at 2 p.m.. He said he'd been out until about 5 a.m. the night before. He was initially terminated by the department but the termination was reversed on appeal. Olsten then left on his own accord.
"I don't want to work in the city anymore," he said in the deposition, which was taken September 2021.
In order to get hired by St. Ann, Jimenez says that any officer, including Olsten, has to go through a rigorous background check with the department and then pass muster with the city's civilian police commissioners, a board which Jimenez describes as a diverse group of St. Ann residents.
"He's been incredible here. No complaints here about him," Jimenez says. "I kind of wonder where the problem lies. Was it the city? Zero complaints and the guys love him. The public loves him. Our community loves him."
Khazaeli, the attorney, feels differently. In addition to representing people suing Boyd, Khazaeli is the lead attorney in the civil suit against Olsten and is the one who took his deposition.
"I'm sure St. Ann taxpayers will have to pay for his future misdeeds like St. Louis taxpayers have already done and will continue to do," Khazaeli says.
While Olsten and Boyd walk their respective beats, Blackwell remains in a St. Louis County jail cell, where he's been since June and where all indications point to him staying until the charges against him work their way through the courts. He has resigned from the North County Police Cooperative.
There's a tricky asymmetry at work when it comes to holding bad cops to account. A fair and competent prosecution of any law-breaking officer will bolster the public trust in policing, but only in small measure compared to the extent to which an officer's crimes tear that trust down.
"When I talk to people about these types of officers, they always try to tell me that the officer is just one bad apple," says Khazaeli. "But as somebody who wasn't born in America, I've always been interested in American idioms. And the full idiom is that one bad apple spoils the bunch."
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