On Thursday August 15th the local Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) hosted a protest at City Hall in response to the recent hiring of Officer Treyston Johnson. Johnson previously worked in Kinston, South Carolina where he ran over pedestrian Lyndon Williams, a homeless Black man, in 2021. WNCT9 reported that the niece of Lyndon Williams wanted “justice and to find out what led to the crash.” The news station additionally reported “a lot of people get around the Kinston area on foot. Some people told 9OYS [9 On Your Side] it’s dangerous and that they want to see drivers be more careful on the roads.” According to protesters, the circumstances of the incident aren’t clear with regards to the speed at which Johnson was driving and the severity of injuries to Williams that ended fatally.
According to one organizer: “if the people hiring Officer Johnson haven’t seen the footage, that only raises our concerns that his enlistment was short sided and without proper investigation. We know our own department has been plagued by such falsifications and police misconduct. This time last year the Muncie Police Department was embroiled in its own scandal of falsifying reports and brutalization. When the sentence of Chase Winkle, one of the police officers involved in brutalizing a community member, our own local judge Tania Pratt said that he terrorized the Muncie community. And his conduct during his assaults against community members were not a one time lapse in judgement.”
In a statement by Chief of Police Nathan Sloan he claimed that there were accusations by Muncie residents that Officer Johnson was intoxicated during the incident, however the Post-Democrat was unable to find any such accusations.
