By Brittany McGee
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Ga.
COLUMBUS, Ga. — The Columbus Consolidated Government Personnel Review Board reinstated a Columbus Police Department captain on July 15 after he was fired for insubordination.
CPD Chief Stoney Mathis terminated Capt. Gregory Touchberry last fall after Touchberry, in February 2025, sent an email to other captains and Chief Deputy Clyde Dent expressing concerns about unintended consequences of a police officer productivity tracker Mathis implemented.
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Stacking tickets
Touchberry and two lieutenants sought to create a squad to look for illegal weapons, wanted people and narcotics, he told the board during its July 15 hearing.
They chose this squad by picking the highest-producing officers on his shift, according to Stat Tracker, he said.
When he did a deep dive into the squad’s productivity, Touchberry said, he realized they didn’t find illegal firearms or wanted people, but they wrote a lot of warnings and citations.
The trend was that the officers would pull people over and give them as many as six or seven citations, Touchberry said. When he met with the officers, Touchberry said, it was clear they believed it was acceptable to write numerous warnings or citations.
“The concern I had was the department and these officers, through misguided means, felt like the only thing that mattered was their monthly Stat Tracker number,” Touchberry said.
Touchberry’s February email expressed his concern that the tracker placed pressure on officers to increase their stats, which could result in violations of citizens’ civil rights, Dent testified during the hearing.
This tracker was intended to help set a standard for the police department and support community policing, Mathis said during the hearing.
“I don’t just collect the data that some people collect, which is citations or arrests,” Mathis said. “I like to make it fair across the board because it’s hard to judge what a police officer is using their time for if you’re not calculating it. It’s hard to judge what they do as far as community policing.”
This could include helping stranded motorists, assisting people in the heat or writing a warning.
Mathis took issue with Touchberry’s email partly because Mathis had sent out an email five days prior, explaining he had been told officers were “stacking tickets.”
“They weren’t doing anything illegal,” Mathis said. “But they were writing a ticket and then three warnings to the same person.”
He is a proponent of writing warnings, Mathis said, because the goal is to change behavior rather than generating revenue. Mathis criticized Touchberry for not noticing officers writing an unusually large number of warnings each month and addressing the issue sooner.
“If you’ve got an officer who’s writing 200 warnings in a month, a good, prudent supervisor will look and see what those warnings are,” Mathis said. “(They would) not wait six, seven months and then accuse them of violating people’s rights.”
These problems don’t happen in isolation, Touchberry told the board, and if it was happening on one shift then there was a chance it was happening on other shifts.
“I reached out so that this email could generate discussion and investigation,” Touchberry said. “It did not. I was silenced. I just hope y’all can see that.”
Insubordination
Mathis said he considered the problems highlighted in Touchberry’s email and agreed with them, which was evident by his own email sent about the issue a week before Touchberry’s email. But his concern about Touchberry’s email was in the way it was sent, Mathis said.
“His email was not to me,” Mathis said. “His email was to selective captains and the deputy chief.”
This was a sign of Touchberry starting a “coup” against Stat Tracker, Mathis said.
In Touchberry’s email, he wrote, “I believe all of you will agree with me that CPD’s current Stat Tracker culture is flawed. If we choose to continue with Stat Tracker, I recommend we completely start over.”
The fact that Touchberry said “if we decide to eliminate” the tracker, referring to the group of people he sent the email to, is why Mathis felt the captain was trying to start a coup, Mathis said.
This would not be Touchberry’s decision, Mathis said.
“His email was trying to garner support to eliminate the stat tracker,” Mathis said. “So there would be no way of judging officers productively.”
Ken Davis, Touchberry’s attorney representing him during the hearing, argued Touchberry never said in his email he wanted to eliminate the Stat Tracker.
“I’d recommend y’all look at the email,” Davis told the board.
Touchberry testified that he didn’t specifically criticize the Stat Tracker or Mathis in his email.
Mathis met with Touchberry on Aug. 14, 2025, to discuss the email after it came to his attention, he said, but they didn’t reach a resolution.
Touchberry walked into the meeting and commented that it “looks like a Spanish Inquisition,” Mathis said.
Touchberry’s attorney, Ken Davis, alleged that Mathis began the Aug. 14 meeting by accusing Touchberry of insubordination.
“Would that not set somebody on edge and make them defensive?” Davis asked Mathis during the hearing.
Davis argued that Touchberry perceived he was being attacked during the meeting because of the accusation, playing an audio recording of the start of the meeting.
In the recording, Mathis is heard telling Touchberry that Dent sent him the email Touchberry had sent in February 2025.
“(It was) basically undermining the Stat Tracker and criticizing the Stat Tracker,” Mathis said in the recording. “In my opinion, it’s insubordination, and you clearly were trying to rally those captains in a coup against the Stat Tracker.”
Touchberry told Mathis during the meeting he disagrees with his interpretation of the email.
“He was attacking me and demeaning,” Touchberry told the board in the hearing.
Touchberry denied violating policy, being disrespectful and being untruthful.
Decision to terminate
This incident wasn’t the first time there had been issues with Touchberry, Mathis told the board.
He moved Touchberry from special ops to patrol because “all the people wanted to get out of spec ops because of him,” Mathis said.
“They are the very high-level, high-speed police officers,” he said. “And I thought maybe his leadership style is not keen enough to manage high-level people. Let me send him to patrol, where he can mentor some of these young police officers.”
During Touchberry’s first few months in patrol, Mathis said, his tracker numbers were very high. They were so high that, in April 2024 , Mathis asked Touchberry to meet with other commanders to discuss strategic plans and explain what he was doing to get his numbers so high.
“He turned around immediately and sent that same email to Assistant Chief Debra Kennedy and said, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?,’” Mathis said.
Following their August 2025 meeting, Mathis called for a show-cause hearing on Aug. 21, 2025, he said.
The hearing was scheduled for Aug. 29, he said, which was longer than the minimum five-days notice required to provide Touchberry time to prepare an explanation or present facts.
“He came in with the same defiant attitude he was in my office with,” Mathis said.
Mathis decided to terminate Touchberry after this hearing, he said, because of Touchberry’s “uncooperative attitude and defiant conduct” in the Aug. 14 meeting. Mathis also said Touchberry showed “clear and deliberate violations of policy relating to insubordination and truthfulness” in the termination letter.
Touchberry wasn’t “truthful,” Mathis said, because his email implied that Touchberry had noticed the issues with warnings and citations being stacked despite Mathis sending an email about the same problem a week earlier.
During the hearing, Davis argued Mathis and Touchberry could have recognized the same problem.
Davis asked Mathis, “Can two people not identify something at the same time, chief?”
Mathis said he consulted with Mayor Skip Henderson about his decision to fire Touchberry before issuing the termination letter Sept. 17.
The board’s decision
After both parties presented their cases, the personnel review board, chaired by Willie Belfield, asked some questions.
Board member Natalie McDowell asked for clarification about the chain of command. Mathis explained Touchberry was one of four captains under Dent’s command.
Board member Antron Murray also asked questions about the chain of command and the open-door policy.
“If one has a concern, and you have an open-door policy, but that employee decides to go to the immediate supervisor, do you deem that is insubordinate to you because they did not come to you?” Murray asked, referring to Touchberry sending his email to Dent.
Mathis said he tells officers he would rather they go to their immediate supervisor before coming to him if their issue isn’t resolved.
Murray also challenged Mathis’ assertion that Touchberry did not answer questions during their Aug. 14 meeting. Reading from the transcript of the recording, Murray noted Touchberry explained it was part of his duties to let his supervisor know about potential issues that could cause problems.
“Is that not answering your question?” Murray asked Mathis.
“No, that was not,” Mathis said.
He was asking Touchberry what his intentions were in sending the email, Mathis said, not asking about the content of the email.
Board member Donna Tompkins asked whether Touchberry had an attorney with him during the show-cause hearing. Mathis said he did not, although he had that right.
“About 70% of the employees do show up with an attorney,” Mathis said. “And the attorney can be in the room, but they’re not allowed to get engaged.”
Murray also asked Mathis whether Touchberry received the email Mathis sent about this issue.
Dent sent the email to his four captains about 50 minutes after receiving it, Mathis said. Touchberry told the board he did receive the email from Dent.
Touchberry had been looking into the issue and had confronted members of the squad about it the day before receiving Mathis’ email, Touchberry said.
When he received Mathis’ email, Touchberry said, he thought it was because one of the lieutenants he confronted had spoken with the chief.
“I actually believed his email confirmed my stance,” Touchberry said. “And I figured they were trying to run around me because that was a common occurrence with the open-door policy. In my mind, when the email came out, and I forwarded it to all the sergeants on my shift, it was confirmation that nobody in our chain of command would want or ever intend for people to be stopping one violator and writing four bald-tire tickets — one for each tire.”
After deliberating in private, the board returned to open session and Belfield, McDowell, Murray and Tompkins voted unanimously to overturn the decision to terminate Touchberry. Vice chairwoman Donna Baker didn’t attend the hearing.
None of the board members, who are appointed by the Columbus Council, explained the rationale for their decision.
The Ledger-Enquirer tried to reach Mathis and Touchberry for comment after the hearing. CPD public information officer Brittany Santiago told the L-E in an email, “The Columbus Police Department does not comment on personnel matters. Therefore, Chief Mathis will not be providing a statement.”
The L-E didn’t reach Touchberry or Davis for comment before publication. Santiago didn’t reply to the L-E’s questions about whether Touchberry has returned to CPD.
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