He told her to stop making excuses.
She remembered the fear of losing her medication.
And the shame of explaining to her employer why she missed work.
Then she began crying.
"I kept thinking I must have done something wrong."
The investigator waited.
Patricia wiped her eyes.
"But all I did was fill a prescription."
Her account became one of several that investigators compared with the department records.
A second case involved a white elderly man named Harold Finley.
He was sixty-nine, a retired carpenter, and lived alone.
Mercer had stopped him near a pharmacy after confusing him with someone described in a dispatch call.
Harold had difficulty hearing.
He repeatedly asked the officer to speak more clearly.
Mercer interpreted his hesitation as refusal to cooperate.
The encounter ended without an arrest, but Harold later complained about threatening language and the temporary seizure of his belongings.
The internal record described him as uncooperative.
An available store recording showed him repeatedly gesturing toward his hearing aid.
For several seconds, the investigators watched in silence.
Then one of them asked whether Mercer documented the communication difficulty.
The report didn't mention it.
That omission mattered.
Because a person who can't hear an instruction clearly isn't necessarily refusing to follow it.
And treating disability-related confusion as defiance could turn an ordinary encounter into an unnecessary confrontation.
The investigators added the case to the broader review.
The common problem wasn't that Mercer always targeted one kind of person.
His conduct affected people of different ages and backgrounds.
But the review found that he was particularly aggressive when someone appeared frightened, confused, isolated, or unlikely to challenge his account.
Naomi's race and appearance were important to examining whether discriminatory assumptions influenced his decision.
Her pregnancy was important to evaluating the risks of the force he used.
And her legitimate prescription was central to determining whether he had any reasonable basis for seizing the medication.
The investigators didn't reduce every case to a single explanation.
They examined the actual evidence.
But the pattern suggested that Mercer often treated vulnerability as an opportunity to assert control.
And that his supervisors had failed to respond adequately to repeated warning signs.
Jordan Price provided a detailed statement.
He described the original dispatch report.
The mismatch between the reported suspect and Naomi.
The pharmacy's verification.
And the physical shove that caused her to fall.