In 2015, Mark Oakley, then an officer with the Roanoke Rapids Police Department, slammed a detainee at the Halifax County jail to the ground, then “tased him” while the man was “in handcuffs and posed no threat,” according to a civil lawsuit later filed against Oakley.
An officer who is found to have used excessive force against an unarmed person risks losing his career in law enforcement. That didn’t happen in this case.
The incident sparked an internal investigation, and the Roanoke Rapids police chief at the time would later tell attorneys that he was prepared to terminate Oakley for misconduct. However, Oakley resigned before that investigation concluded.
He would go on to work at three more law enforcement agencies over the next eight years, until eventually he landed in nearby Warren County at the Warrenton Police Department, which fired him in March 2024 following an SBI investigation into multiple complaints of Oakley unnecessarily deploying his Taser on civilians.
Before Oakley used the stun gun on them, all three individuals named in the lawsuit were “detained and immobilized.” One woman was pinned to the front seat of her car and another was handcuffed in a patrol car. A third man was pinned against the back of a car with his hands visible.
Even the investigation into Oakley and his dismissal didn’t mean the end of his career. He continued to work his part-time gig as an officer back in Halifax County with the Littleton Police Department, another small agency just 15 miles from Warrenton. Federal agents arrested him more than a year later for depriving the stun gun victims of their rights “under the color of law,” according to the indictment.
Even then, the Littleton police never actually terminated Oakley. Instead, he handed in his resignation five days after being criminally charged.
Oakley was a prime example of what criminal justice experts call a “wandering officer.”
While no agreed upon definition of a wandering officer exists, the one used by the late scholar Dorothy Moses Schulz is helpful: “a police officer who leaves one department after being terminated for misconduct or under a disciplinary cloud, and secures employment in another law-enforcement agency.”
This article, the first in the three-part investigative series Stray Cops by Carolina Public Press, explores the extent of the wandering officer problem in North Carolina. Upcoming articles in the series will examine the systemic reasons for this phenomenon in North Carolina and potential solutions to increase transparency and accountability in law enforcement hiring.
NC data limits wandering officer count
CPP identified nearly 700 wandering officers in North Carolina as of the most recent data available, although several issues make producing a precise count of wandering officers across the state extremely difficult.
For one, the most recent statewide employment data kept by the NC Department of Justice is inadequate for the task. Since switching to a new database system in 2022, publicly available law enforcement employment data no longer gives a reason for why an officer separated from an agency.
That makes it impossible to distinguish between officers who leave their departments because they retired versus officers whom agencies terminated because of misconduct.
The second problem is identified in Schulz’s definition of a wandering officer. An officer who resigns from one job “under a disciplinary cloud,” as Oakley did in Roanoke Rapids in 2015, is much harder to track compared to an officer whom an agency fired outright.
Keisha James, an attorney with the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit that litigates instances of police misconduct across the county, including North Carolina, said the public often has difficulty getting detailed information about what happened at a previous agency if an officer resigned.
“Even in situations where an officer was engaged in misconduct at a previous employer, you might not be able to get any information about what actually happened, because the investigation essentially closed before it can really begin,” she said. “What would have been a termination ends up in a resignation.”
So, the total number of wandering officers CPP identified likely undercounts the total cases because it doesn’t include anyone without a dismissal on their record, even if they resigned due to accusations of misconduct. It also wouldn’t include officers who were fired from an agency in another state or those dismissed for misconduct while working for a federal agency, such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Even so, this problem persists throughout North Carolina and can still be quantified in a few valuable ways.
Known wandering officers cases across NC
CPP’s analysis showed that as of 2022, at least 679 active law enforcement officers whose previous agencies had dismissed them were working again at 327 agencies in North Carolina.
That means that a previous agency had fired about 2%, or one out of every 50, of the 31,898 active North Carolina officers in the 2022 DOJ employment dataset.
Of those wandering officers, agencies had dismissed 69 of them at least twice during their careers. The most egregious of them had been fired at least five times from five different agencies and still managed to find work carrying a badge and a gun.
Wandering officers are located in all regions of the state, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain.
The harm they cause is difficult to measure, but lawsuits, administrative court filings and archival media reports reveal the potentially devastating consequences of allowing them to remain in law enforcement.
Mark Anthony Russell currently works as a Transylvania County sheriff’s deputy. The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office fired Russell in 2011 after he was charged with violating a domestic violence protection order. The Brevard Police Department dismissed Russell again in 2014, DOJ data shows.
Douglas Strader joined the Graham Police Department in 2021, after the Greensboro Police Department had previously fired him for discharging his firearm at a fleeing vehicle. Strader was also one of eight Greensboro officers involved in the 2018 death of Marcus Smith, who died in police custody after officers used a "hogtie" restraint to subdue him.
In the case of Jeffrey Edwards, the State Highway Patrol fired him in 2010 for misconduct, only for Edwards to end up as a deputy at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.
Washington County later fired him in 2022 after he made a violent arrest, dragging a handcuffed detainee down the stairs of the courthouse.
The detainee in that case, who received treatment at a hospital for injuries sustained during the arrest and later had his charges dropped by the district attorney, sued Edwards in 2024 with the help of the National Police Accountability Project and eventually settled out of court.
Edwards still works in law enforcement today as a deputy with the Tyrrell County Sheriff's Office.
Some who wander become boss
In some cases, wandering officers failed upwards into leadership positions, often at small departments. Such was the case with both of Oakley’s bosses in Warrenton and Littleton, who hired him after he resigned from Roanoke Rapids.
Former Warrenton Police Chief Goble Lane lost his job with the Franklinton Police Department in Franklin County in 2005, then went on to work at three more agencies over the next five years before settling in Warrenton.
A 2025 civil lawsuit accuses Lane of protecting Oakley despite persistent complaints from civilians and fellow officers. According to the lawsuit, Lane once instructed another police officer to alter paperwork related to a separate incident to make it appear that Oakley was not at fault.
The lawsuit, which brought legal claims against not just Oakley and Goble but the Town of Warrenton itself, accused Goble of retaliating against other officers who reported Oakley's misconduct.
“There's many instances where there's a ‘rogue officer,’ or someone who acts alone and the supervisors have a very good case to make that they really didn't know what was happening,” said Abraham Rubert-Schewel, the attorney representing the plaintiffs who claimed Oakley used excessive force against them.
“But here, the facts really show something different.”
Certification records indicate that Lane currently works at the Middlesex Police Department in Nash County and in Henderson with the Vance-Granville Community College Police Department.
Meanwhile, Oakley’s other boss, Phillip Trivette, who isn’t named in the civil lawsuit, had been dismissed from three departments before becoming chief of police in Littleton.
In 2016, an administrative law judge affirmed a decision by the NC Sheriff’s Standards Division to deny Trivette’s application for certification with the Halifax County Sheriff’s Office, based on four prior misdemeanor convictions for worthless checks. He was later hired in Littleton.
In an interview with the News & Observer, Trivette defended his decision to retain Oakley after he’d been fired from Warrenton, claiming that he’d never had any problems with Oakley at his department.
Trivette announced his retirement as chief in 2025, several months before Oakley was arrested. Littleton’s website shows that Trivette still works there as a police officer.
In another case, Orlando Rosario Jr., an officer who had been dismissed from three different agencies in his career, became the police chief in the tiny town of Statonsburg in Wilson County.
The Goldsboro Police Department hired Rosario in 2008, after four short stints at other police departments, one of which fired him. In 2009, the Goldsboro News-Argus reported that Rosario caught heat from the local NAACP chapter for telling a trainee during an arrest at an apartment complex to “shoot (anyone in the crowd of onlookers) in the f—ing head if he gets any closer.”
Goldsboro later dismissed Rosario in 2011. The Black Creek Police Department then fired him from his next job in 2015. But he managed to stick with Stantonsburg, where he worked for 10 years before resigning as chief in 2025.
Employment records indicate that Rosario currently works as an officer with the Knightdale Police Department, his eighth agency in 25 years.
None of the departments where Rosario, Trivette or Lane currently work responded to CPP’s request for comment before the publication of this story.
Public and private, rural and urban, large and small
The data shows that all types of law enforcement agencies hire wandering officers, including sheriff’s offices, municipalities, state agencies and specialized departments within college campuses, hospitals and airports.
Of the 327 agencies in North Carolina that employed wandering officers in 2022, Allied Universal Company Police, which is operated by a private security company based in Pennsylvania, had the most with 23 previously dismissed cops.
Under state law, private companies like Allied Universal are permitted to form company police departments with sworn officers certified by the Criminal Justice Standards Division. Those officers have the same ability to arrest and charge perpetrators with crimes as any other sworn officer in the state.
North State Security Group employed at least eight wandering officers in 2022. Southeastern Company Police and On Point Company Police each employed two, according to the data.
College campuses and hospitals are also common places to find wandering officers.
The Wake Medical Center, which employed 41 full-time police officers in 2022, had six previously dismissed officers working for them. Vidant Company Police, the law enforcement arm for what is now ECU Health, employed eight previously dismissed officers.
The campus police department for North Carolina Central University employed five. The campus departments at Shaw, Elon and North Carolina A&T each employed three.
Sheriff’s offices accounted for 322 of the 679 identified wandering officers — or about 47%. Municipal police departments employed 280 of them.
More than half of those wandering officers, 383, were employed in rural counties as classified by the NC Rural Center. Agencies in urban counties only accounted for 96 of them.
But the most important factor affecting where wandering officers work probably isn’t agency type or urban-rural classifications. It’s more likely that department size and resources matter most.
Specifically, small departments — which have less money for things like competitive salaries and thorough background investigations — are overrepresented in the data.
For example, both the Tabor City Police Department in Columbus County and the State Highway Patrol employed five previously dismissed officers in 2022. But considering that Tabor City only had nine full-time officers on its payroll, while the Highway Patrol employed 1,550, those are two vastly different data points.
Warrenton, where Oakley worked, employed 10 sworn police officers in 2022, some full-time and others part-time.
Of those 10 officers, four including Lane had been dismissed from previous jobs. That count doesn’t even include Oakley, who had resigned under investigation at Roanoke Rapids before he could be fired. In all, at least half of Warrenton’s cops at that time were wandering officers.
The civil lawsuit against Oakley, Lane and the Town of Warrenton indicates that not only did Lane know about the complaints about Oakley, but so did at least one Town Council member who chose not to investigate further.
That’s an institutional failure, not just the work of one person, Rubert-Schewel said.
“In cases like (Oakley’s), clearly the buck doesn’t stop just with the officer. Here, we have direct evidence that his supervisors and an elected official knew what was happening and failed to intervene and discipline or remove Oakley as they should have.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.