Sheriff’s Deputy resigns after video goes viral

-A Sergeant with the Saratoga County Sheriff’s Department has resigned from his job and been criminally charged following an encounter with a suspect in which he appears to hit the man, forcibly take his car keys and illegally search his vehicle. Former Sgt. Shawn Glans is charged with one count of harassment and one count of official misconduct following an investigation prompted by a video of the encounter. The incident was recorded on a cellphone by someone who was with the suspect at the time. Glans and two other deputies were responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle around 2am on Friday. When they arrived, the vehicle was gone but they quickly located it in the parking lot of the nearby Walmart in Halfmoon. Sgt. Glans reported seeing a gun in the backseat and then going inside the store to locate the registered owner of the car. In the video, posted to Youtube and shared hundreds of thousands of times over the weekend, Sgt. Glans can be heard cursing at the suspect and demanding he hand over his keys. The video also shows what appears to be Glans slap the suspect and then take the keys to his car, throw them to another deputy and demand the car be searched. The owner of the car and gun, 20-year old Colin Fitch was not charged. The gun was determined to have been purchased legally. “After I was struck, he basically took them out of my hand without my permission or anything, he just took them and tossed them to the other officers and searched my car without my consent,” Fitch tells CBS6 exclusively adding, “his actions, there should be consequences. I mean I don’t want to say “Oh, I want him to go to jail” but I just hope he gets the proper punishment that goes hand and hand with his actions.” Sgt. Glans resigned on Monday. His wife tells CBS6, he made a mistake, “obviously, he reacted quickly, a lot of people are going to view that as incorrect or improper, I’m not going to diminish those feelings from people. I understand people are going to have their opinions and that’s perfectly fine, what I would say is that, I hope one day that you and your loved one or someone close to you–doesn’t make a bad decision… these nasty comments that you’re making are not your best choices either,” says Carrie Glans. She says her family has been threatened a number of times since the video was posted to Youtube, “they’ve made threats that they’re going to make our family pay, find our home and make us pay, I mean you can have your opinion but wow,” she says. Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo has little remorse for his former sergeant saying, “If you do your job the right way, you should have nothing to worry about…For the most part, we’ve got a great department here. Don’t let this one act diminish the job they do to protect the citizens of Saratoga County.” The investigation into the situation is still ongoing. Although Sgt. Glans resigned, there were two other deputies on the scene during this incident, neither of which came forward until after the video surfaced. Zurlo says they are still being questioned and the matter is still under investigation. This is not the first time Sgt. Glans has been disciplined. In 1996, he was speeding to a 911 call, came around a corner, lost control of his patrol vehicle and slammed into another car head-on. The driver of that car was paralyzed. The county paid 6 million dollars to settle a suit against the department and Sgt. Glans, at the time.

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