Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Gina Cook is beating up her girlfriends again.
The last time she did this — that we know of — was in 2003. Here’s how that went, as reported by me in Creative Loafing according to the police report:
Cook drove her K-9 unit patrol vehicle to her ex-girlfriend’s apartment and kicked down the door when the woman refused to let her in.
The ex-girlfriend, another Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer named Rebecca Serena Garber, had been asleep with a third woman, whom Cook attacked. When Garber tried to stop the attack by putting herself between Cook and the other woman, Cook punched Garber in the face and head several times before throwing her on the bed and strangling her until she couldn’t breathe.
“I know she can’t breathe,” Cook growled when the third woman pointed out that Garber was struggling for air, according to the report. After the attack, Cook drove away from the scene in her patrol vehicle.
Cook not only wasn’t fired, but incredibly, seven months later, she was the subject of a full-page personal profile in the Charlotte City Employees’ June newsletter, which is distributed to thousands of city employees. The piece chronicled Cook’s rise to the highly competitive K-9 unit in near-heroic, glowing terms.
Ironically, as I pointed out at the time, Cook was a textbook example of the kind of domestic batterer the department’s new domestic violence program had just been launched to track.
This enraged male cops throughout the department who claimed a male officer would be fired after domestic violence charges, but that Cook was getting special treatment because she’s homosexual.
In fact, a male officer, Robert Wood, was fired that month on domestic violence charges for violating North Carolina General Statute 14-202, which makes it illegal to secretly peep into a room occupied by a female after his ex-wife caught him peeping through the window of her apartment. He had no history of violence toward her. Cook, meanwhile, was given deferred prosecution for two charges of communicating threats and an assault charge and allowed to continue on the force..
It should be interesting to see if Cook survives this as well.
What is ironic is that the city paid out a settlement after failing to catch the domestic violence history of Officer Marcus Jackson in a 2005 background check, including a restraining order taken out against him after he hit and slapped his girlfriend. Cook’s domestic violence history couldn’t have been “missed” by the department, because a series of articles about it appeared in Creative Loafing in 2003. It’s unclear what the department’s excuse is this time.
It should be interesting to see if Cook keeps her job this time.
