On June 23, 2012, Florida Corrections Officer Roland Clarke locked inmate Darren Rainey in a shower with scalding-hot water as punishment for defecating in his cell. Clarke and his colleagues left the schizophrenic 50-year-old, who was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession, screaming inside the shower for two hours. By the time they returned to let him out, he was dead. An autopsy revealed Rainey's body had been so badly burned that huge portions of skin were peeling off.
Clarke resigned as a prison guard in July 2014 after a Miami Herald investigation into Rainey's death raised an international outcry. Prosecutors later declined to charge the guard with a crime, though, and he quickly found work with the Miami Gardens Police Department as a patrol officer.
It didn't take long for Clarke to start breaking the rules there too.
An internal affairs (IA) file obtained by New Times shows Clarke has been investigated by his department's IA unit twice for having inappropriate relationships with women while on duty. In the first case, Clarke was suspended for five days in 2016 after investigators found he'd been visiting a woman at her house while he was on the job — though that infraction didn't stop him from being a finalist for the 2017 Miami-Dade County "Officer of the Year" award.
Now internal investigators are looking into a second, nearly identical allegation, according to emails reviewed by New Times. Audio, photos, and text messages appear to show Clarke again visiting a woman at her home while on duty and in uniform, and even having sex with her on multiple occasions.
Before the probes into his sexual activities on the job, he was cited for running a red light in his police truck and crashing into a driver who had a green light. In March 2016, he was reprimanded again, this time for calling a tow truck to pick up a car that belonged to a drowning victim without first securing a cell phone and wallet inside — both of which disappeared before homicide investigators could obtain that important
evidence.
In the recording, Clarke appears to complain about the woman he had been seeing and who turned him in to IA: "Look what my side bitch did to me," he says in the recording. "That bitch tried to get me fired. 'Cause she know I can't come 'round there acting crazy with her 'cause I'm an officer, so this ho called anonymously, saying, 'This n**** be coming to my house and fucking me on duty.'"
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