PORTALES, N.M. (KRQE) – A Portales police officer was fired after his department said he was lying about how much he was working and about how much he was doing while he was at work.
A video that went viral a few years ago shows Portales Police Officer Larry Garrison, grabbing a handcuffed suspect by his throat and then throwing him to the ground.
Back in October, the Portales Police Department fired Garrison for something else. The department says he was caught lying about working overtime.
Portales Attorney Eric Dixon received the full internal investigation after filing a court order for it.
It says Garrison falsified documents to pad his overtime and make it look like he made more traffic stops than he actually did.
“It showed that he had committed fraud and was untruthful as a result of his time when he said he was out in a saturation patrol and he really wasn’t,” Dixon said.
Garrison has seen a lot of trouble over the years.
He resigned from the Curry County Sheriff’s Office in 2007 after he screamed and cussed at a woman in front of her two young children.
Dixon is interested in Garrison because of a more recent lawsuit. He claims Garrison bullied his client Arturo Aranda by humiliating him while taking him to jail, teasing him about his genitals and his girlfriend who had just left him.
“He has made obscene gestures to him, taunted him, stalked him,” said Dixon.
Dixon thinks Portales Police was negligent in its hiring of Garrison.
KRQE News 13 reached out to the department and the city attorney’s office, but both refused to comment.
