ST. CROIX — Former Territorial Police Chief Winsbut McFarlande Sr. was arrested Friday and charged with simple assault and disturbance of the peace, accused of slapping a man during a disturbance at a Williams Delight residence last weekend, according to the Virgin Islands Police Department.
The 911 Emergency Call Center received a report of a disturbance in progress in Williams Delight at about 11:44 a.m. Sunday, November 8, police said. Officers responded, investigated and identified McFarlande as the assailant. He is accused of slapping a male individual at the residence.
McFarlande turned himself in to the VIPD Patrol Bureau at about 2:57 p.m. Friday on an outstanding arrest warrant, police said. He was booked and charged, and bail was set at $500. He posted bail and was released pending an advice-of-rights hearing scheduled for Monday at Superior Court on St. Croix.
McFarlande’s attorney, Kye Walker, said she could not provide any details of his arrest.
“I try not to comment on pending cases,” she said. “We are in receipt of the charges, and Mr. McFarlande will be defending against them.”
McFarlande previously served as acting St. Croix police chief until he was replaced in 2007. He later retired from the department and worked as a security contractor for Governor Juan F. Luis Hospital and Medical Center for about nine years.
He returned to the VIPD as St. Croix police chief in June 2016, replacing Arthur Hector. In July 2017, then-Governor Kenneth Mapp appointed him territorial police chief, the department’s top uniformed post.
An incident on January 5, 2019, involving McFarlande was part of two quarterly reports from the independent monitor for the Virgin Islands Police Department. In that incident, the independent monitor references that the then territorial police chief assaulted an arrested handcuffed prisoner in the confines of the VIPD’s small mobile command post.
According to one of the reports, on the aforementioned date, between 9:36 and 11:30 p.m., the officer entered the VIPD Mobile Police Station at the Crucian Christmas Festival Village on St. Croix, where four officers and one civilian were present. He was in civilian clothes, with a personally owned five-shot .22-caliber handgun tucked into his belt, a weapon not authorized under VIPD policy.
After a heated, profanity-laced exchange with a prisoner seated with his hands cuffed behind his back, and after the prisoner allegedly spit at him, the chief “punched and slapped the handcuffed individual across his right cheek, resulting in a laceration to the cheek,” the report states.
He admitted to the accusations during compelled internal interviews, according to the monitor’s report, and investigators sustained seven of eight allegations against him, including unauthorized use of force against a handcuffed individual.
McFarlande resigned before a disciplinary hearing could be held, and his resignation was announced nine days later. The VIPD referred the case to the Attorney General’s Office for possible criminal charges, but no resolution of that referral had been filed as of August 2020, according to the independent monitor overseeing the department’s compliance with a federal consent decree on use of force. When District Judge Curtis Gómez questioned the territory’s attorney about it in open court, he “received no reasonable explanation for their dereliction in this case,” the monitor wrote.
McFarlande was not criminally charged in that incident. Governor Albert Bryan Jr. announced the resignation at a January 22, 2019, press conference.
