Wichita officer Justin Rapp planned to tell family of man he killed to ‘get over it’

Wichita police officer Justin Rapp, who shot and killed unarmed Andrew Finch in 2017, told a police supervisor that if he ever ran into Finch’s mother, he would tell her to “get over it,” a leaked internal police record shows.

That’s one of apparently multiple inflammatory comments Rapp made to fellow officers in the aftermath of the Finch killing that “damages the public trust and confidence and shows lack of sound judgment,” according to a letter sent to Rapp by a deputy chief in May 2020.

It’s unclear if Rapp was disciplined for the comments. But they were troubling enough to former Chief Gordon Ramsay and his executive team that they denied him a promotion to detective in 2020.

“You failed to demonstrate an appreciation for the immense impact of the incident on the community, the department and the impacted family,” Deputy Chief Wanda Givens, who retired in January, told Rapp in a “skip” letter alerting him that he had been denied the promotion.

“Most notably, when discussing the propriety of your return to off-duty employment at Wal-Mart with supervisors, you acknowledged that you would probably run into the family someday,” Givens wrote, ”and, if you did, you would say something to the effect of ‘yes, I had to shoot your son. I’m over it, and you need to get over it too.’”

“Of course, anything communicated along those lines would not only be unnecessarily hurtful to the family, but also would greatly damage the entire police department’s reputation and relations with the community,” the letter continued.

Givens reminded Rapp that Wichita police detectives are expected to be “perceptive and aware of the effects their words have.”

Under the terms of the city’s contract with the Fraternal Order of Police, promotion denials require the city to give suggestions of what the officer can work on to improve their opportunity for promotion in the future. The suggestions given to Rapp were “continued good work in the field” and “the passage of time.”

Within four months of Ramsay’s March 1 resignation, and two years after the skip letter, interim chief Lem Moore promoted Rapp to detective, despite concerns raised by Mayor Brandon Whipple and City Council members Maggie Ballard and Mike Hoheisel.

Moore did not disclose Rapp’s comments to City Manager Robert Layton, Whipple or the council members, who met with Moore in late June for a briefing on the promotion. At the time, Moore told city leaders that there was nothing in Rapp’s personnel file that would stand in the way of a promotion.

Whipple said he feels like he was lied to. Layton said he trusts Moore but that there’s a problem with information sharing between the police and the rest of the city government.

“I did not have a copy of that when I initially learned about the promotion and talked to Chief Moore,” Layton said in an interview with The Eagle. “And then after . . . the HR Director (Chris Bezruki) shared a copy of the letter with me. So the decision had already been made that we were moving down the road in that regard, but I visited with Chief Moore to ask him did he consider what was in that letter when he made the promotion. And he said that he had considered it.”

“According to Chief Moore — and you need to talk to him because it was his judgment — he believes that his (Rapp’s) performance had been good since 2020 and that enough time had passed and that he had scored high enough on the test to be eligible. So that’s the rationale he gave for moving on beyond what was in the 2020 letter. It’s his subjective opinion about how Officer Rapp had performed since the 2020 letter.”

City officials did not respond to a request for an interview with Moore and Rapp or to written questions for Moore on Tuesday.

Moore promoted Rapp while the city continues to fund his defense in a federal lawsuit filed by the Finch family. In a written statement to The Eagle at the time, Moore said disqualifying officers from promotions for shooting civilians “would not only be contrary to existing policy, but would also not allow otherwise qualified individuals to advance within the department.”

The city of Wichita did not share the personnel record with the Finch family’s civil rights lawyer, who said he believes it should have been handed over under seal during discovery in the lawsuit against Rapp.

“All I can say is this: the contents of that letter are extremely disturbing, and that document was never produced to plaintiff’s counsel in the Finch case,” Andrew M. Stroth, the Finch family’s lawyer, said in a phone interview.

Andrew Finch
Andrew Finch

Lisa Finch, Andrew’s mother, said members of her family have had run-ins with Rapp at his off-duty Wal-Mart security job. But he has not said anything like what was mentioned in the letter, Finch said.

“I’m not surprised by that statement, but it’s going to be the one that’s his downfall,” Finch said. “How does this play out now?”

Layton would not say whether the letter could jeopardize Rapp’s promotion.

“I hesitate to answer that because I haven’t had a chance to visit with the chief one more time on it,” Layton said. “But there wasn’t anything that I’m aware of that happened from 2020 to 2022 that would have said that he did not meet the criteria that were established for him in that letter.”

Layton said he has to trust Moore’s judgment that Rapp deserves the promotion.

“I do trust Chief Moore,” Layton said. “I think he’s working hard to do the best he can in running the department and in reaching out to the community and trying to re-connect with the community. And I don’t know that I can say much more than that.”

Police hunt for leaker

Rapp’s skip letter was leaked to independent activist-journalist Meko Haze, who provided a copy to the City Council, mayor and The Eagle on Tuesday. He is not naming the source to protect them from retaliation. City officials confirmed the authenticity of the record to The Eagle.

Haze recently narrated portions of a Netflix docuseries “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet” that placed the Finch killing back in the national spotlight. Rapp’s promotion came two weeks after the documentary’s release.

On Tuesday, Haze criticized the city’s decision to promote Rapp.

“In a city where they’re trying to rebuild the police relationship, to make that move, days after that Netflix documentary came out — are you insane? I mean, my God, man,” Haze said.

Rapp shot and killed Finch, a 28-year-old father, in December 2017 after a California serial hoaxer reported a bogus murder-hostage situation — called swatting — at Finch’s address.

On the night of his death, Finch opened his door, stepped out on his porch and within 10 seconds had been shot in the chest by Rapp, who was positioned 40 yards away with a rifle. Law enforcement had surrounded the Finch residence and shouted conflicting commands when he stepped outside. There was no verbal warning before the shot.

Rapp told investigators that he thought Finch had a gun and presented a lethal threat to officers near the house.

Federal courts have denied qualified immunity to Rapp, ruling that “a reasonable officer would have known that using deadly force when Finch displayed no weapon and made no overtly threatening movement was unlawful.”

Ann Jones, a Wichita police accountability activist, read Rapp’s 2020 rejection letter into the public record at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. She said it appears the city is more focused on defending Rapp in court than doing right by the Finch family.

“You would rather defend a monster who’s never shown an ounce of remorse than do what’s right by these two children whose father he murdered for opening his own damn door,” Jones told the City Council.

She also questioned whether the skip letter should have been revealed earlier.

“I don’t know what you all were told, but this appears to be from Rapp’s personnel file,” Jones said. “It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t secret. It wasn’t separate or misplaced. It’s a digital file. There was no separate file, nor was it hidden away somewhere. Bob (Layton) and Lem (Moore) had access to this all along.”

Haze and Jones said the Wichita Police Department’s Professional Standards Bureau — which investigates potential policy violations by officers — is pressuring them to identify the person who leaked the letter.

“Sounds like we could be taken in for questioning,” Jones said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “But MY question is this . . . “Why are we focusing on WHERE the document came from, & not the document itself????”

Whipple said he’s disappointed with how he found out about the letter. He said it shows a breakdown in communication between the city’s elected officials, the city manager and the Wichita Police Department. He said he’s more concerned that the information was not available sooner.

“It’s strange to me that I can’t get this (skip letter),” Whipple said. “It had to get leaked out to the activist community so that they could leak it to the council. That’s where we’re at today.”

Bigger problem?

Whipple said he sees Rapp’s comments as part of a larger problem within the Wichita Police Department.

The city recently disciplined several officers after a Wichita Eagle investigation found they had not been disciplined in a year since the department discovered racist, sexist and homophobic text messages sent or received by Wichita police officers.

Many of the messages took a callous approach toward violence against civilians.

“I’m disgusted with the idea that anyone would feel it’s appropriate to tell a family that they need to just ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one who was killed,” Whipple said. “That line, frankly, is reminiscent of the text message scandal in which people really made light of situations that result in citizens being shot.

“It’s an attitude that is not becoming of the values of our city,” Whipple said.

The Eagle’s investigation relied on leaked documents that likely would have never been publicly disclosed. The city would not release the text messages or the names of the officers involved in the scandal. Even the description provided initially to the Citizen Review Board — which is supposed to provide oversight of disciplinary actions against officers — did not provide a clear picture of the extent of the troubling text messages.

After a push by the mayor and city council, the review board and a city manager’s office committee released reports on the text messages that said the whole incident was mishandled by Ramsay’s leadership team. The reports called on Moore to take disciplinary action against those officers and to hire an outside consultant to do a cultural assessment of the police department.

Layton said he didn’t know about the text messages until The Eagle had already started its investigation. Ramsay told The Eagle that Layton knew about the text messages a year earlier.

Layton said he leaves promotion decisions to the chief of police and managers across the city’s departments. But he said the Rapp promotion has prompted him to get more involved in those decisions.

“We need to have another step in the process where at least I understand what the rationale is for promotions as they go forward,” Layton said. “But before I implement something that is permanent, I want to hear from our consultant about what best practices are in police departments and in city organizations because I think I can learn, and I think we can all learn, from what the promotion process is in some of those other communities.”

Layton said the consultant’s assessment is “not meant to be just checking off a box” and that it will address the communication breakdown between police, human resources, the law department and the city manager’s office. The city has narrowed the list of finalists for the assessment to two firms and it’s unclear when a consultant will be selected.

“It’s to be an honest evaluation of how we stand as a police department and to address those kinds of issues,” Layton said. “It’s all about making sure that we have the public’s trust. . . . It’s an honest endeavor to look at what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong.”

Page 1 of Justin Rapp "skip letter" on detective promotion

Page 1 of Justin Rapp
Page 1 of Justin Rapp

Contributed to DocumentCloud by Chance Swaim (Wichita Eagle) • View document or read text

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