FOSTORIA — Clayton Moore says they used to call him Officer Friendly. He loved it.
Not that he didn’t have qualms about starting his career. As the first Black police officer in Fostoria, he’d deal with what he calls “the double whammy” of white people claiming he was a token hire and Black Fostorians questioning his loyalty.
But as a former high school and college football player and as a coach in the community, he was known about town and interacted a lot with kids, along with his other police roles. Hired in 1986, he enjoyed being a cop and rose through the ranks, being elected president of the patrol union and then of the command union when he was made a sergeant in 2007.
And then everything changed. Disputes between officers and the city over a controversial police chief hire raised tensions in the department and led to a lawsuit that went to the Ohio Supreme Court. When that chief fired him in 2008, he somewhat expected it.
“There was an agenda, they knew what they were doing,” he said.
Mr. Moore details his hiring as Fostoria’s first Black officer, his career, his termination, and his reinstatement in his newly published memoir, “Good Cop, Black Cop: Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” He held a book signing event Sunday at the Fostoria Learning Center, and is scheduled to hold a book talk at noon April 20 at the Kiwanis meeting at Fostoria High School.
His stepson, NFL safety Micah Hyde, wrote the foreword.
Born in Chicago, Mr. Moore and his family moved to Fostoria just before he started high school. He played football in both Fostoria and the University of Toledo, where he graduated in 1985.
John McGuire was hired in 2006 as the chief, prompting a lawsuit by the police union because of a requirement that the chief be hired internally. Mr. Moore was part of the lawsuit, which was kicked around courts for years before the city finally won.
“The next thing you know things started happening,” Mr. Moore said. “Everyone who was a part of the union came under attack.”
The chief raised 16 charges against Mr. Moore that he says were bogus.
“Every charge that they charged me with was a sham,” he said.
The department had a policy, for instance, to flush down a toilet a minor misdemeanor amount of marijuana if a suspect was facing more serious charges, and to then not log the drug seizure. He was charged with not logging those drugs, he said.
He also said he was accused of sexual harassment for calling the chief’s executive assistant stupid to another person.
Messages left for Fostoria Police Chief Keith Loreno and Mayor Eric Keckler were not returned. A records request for the charges against Mr. Moore and the arbitration decision was still being processed Friday by Fostoria officials.
Mr. Moore grieved his termination, and the union took the matter to arbitration. That arbitrator threw out the termination, in what Mr. Moore calls “a scathing rebuke against the city.”
He was reinstated in March, 2009, and the city was ordered to pay him for wages lost from the day he was fired. He’d go on to work another 10 years in the department, before retiring in 2018.
While the termination received media coverage, little was said about his reinstatement, Mr. Moore said. People would tell him that he only got his job back because he was Black.
He was prepared to be under a microscope because of the department’s lack of diversity. The city didn’t hire another Black officer during his three-decade career. Mr. Moore said he doesn’t believe that was deliberate, but that the city didn’t make diversity a priority.
That lack of diversity and the failure of police departments to fully engage in communities they patrol has helped create a divide and distrust. Mr. Moore said he was stirred by the killings of Philando Castile and Trayvon Martin and wanted to speak out more.
“Racism survives and is real. There is an injustice out there. But it's something we can defeat,” he said. “There's things we can do, but we need to have a real conversation, a respectful dialogue.”
First Published March 28, 2021, 9:53 p.m.
