Date of Offense
Statement
Officer Name: Hunter Foster
Agency at Time of Incident: Southaven Police Department (MS)
Subject Matter: Official Misconduct, Deceptive Report Filing, Falsification of Evidence, and Excessive Use of Force
In 2019, while employed as a law enforcement officer for the Southaven Police Department, Officer Hunter Foster responded to a call regarding a "suspicious vehicle" in a local Waffle House parking lot. Following the encounter, Officer Foster drafted and executed an official police incident report outlining the details of the seizure.
In that official report, Officer Foster explicitly claimed that the driver of the vehicle put the car in motion, accelerated directly toward law enforcement personnel, and "almost ran over" another responding officer. This specific factual assertion was used to legally justify an escalated, aggressive physical intervention by the police.
A subsequent federal civil rights lawsuit named Officer Foster and approximately one dozen other Southaven officers as defendants. During judicial discovery, objective electronic evidence directly disproved the written narrative submitted by Officer Foster:
- Surveillance Contradiction: Objective video surveillance footage retrieved from the scene and submitted to the U.S. District Court showed no evidence supporting Officer Foster’s narrative. The vehicle did not accelerate toward, drive at, or nearly strike any law enforcement officer.
- Omission of Force: Rather than a defensive response to an attacking vehicle, the video evidence captured Southaven officers aggressively removing occupants from the stationary vehicle and striking them while they were pinned to the ground.
Officer Foster’s written statement was determined to be fundamentally inconsistent with the physical realities recorded by the surveillance cameras. This constitutes a verified instance of a law enforcement officer falsifying an official document to justify a physical use of force.
The underlying federal litigation alleging systemic constitutional violations, falsified reporting, and excessive force against Officer Foster and the City of Southaven was resolved in 2022 via a formal settlement agreement for an undisclosed financial sum.
The US Citizen Reporters are a group of public and private defense advocates that scour the internet for documented incidents of police misconduct that have eluded accountability.
