Cop who kicked man in head on track for return to duty

WILMINGTON, Del. — The Dover police officer who was acquitted earlier this month of assault charges after he kicked a man in the head during an arrest is on the road back to work.

Cpl. Thomas Webster IV will be back on the police department payroll on Sunday but will remain on administrative leave, according to a statement from Paul Bernat, chief of the Dover Police Department. Webster has been on unpaid administrative leave since he was indicted in May.

Webster was acquitted of two counts of criminal assault in early December when a jury found him not guilty of charges stemming from a 2013 arrest, during which he kicked a man in the head. The incident was caught on video by a police car dashcam, but Webster argued that the kick was a necessary use of force to get 29-year-old Lateef Dickerson into custody.

Webster will undergo a psychological evaluation, which is required of any officer who has used deadly force that resulted in injury or death before he is able to return to work. The evaluation consists of several hundred questions and an interview with a psychologist, said the department's spokesman, Master Cpl. Mark Hoffman.

If Webster passes that, he'll go through recertification training before being returned to duty, Hoffman said.

It hasn't yet been decided whether Webster would be returned to his former position as a patrol officer, Hoffman said.

"While the Dover Police Department has treated this incident with the utmost seriousness, Cpl. Webster’s right to return to his job after having been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing must be honored," Bernat said in a prepared statement.

The Department had already done an internal investigation of the 2013 incident and dealt with it "independently of the concurrent criminal proceedings," he said in the statement.

Hoffman was unable to say if discipline had come out of that investigation because of the Law-Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights.