The jury watched the body-camera footage on the first day of trial. The 44-second clip that millions of people had already seen online was played in a courtroom where 12 jurors watched it without distraction and without the ability to scroll past it.
They saw Austin reach for his pocket. They saw the phone. They saw Dempsey's lunge. They heard Austin say he was 17 while he was on the ground in the grass. They heard Chloe scream.
They heard Dempsey say Austin was reaching for a weapon when the footage showed otherwise.
The drug-test results were presented by a toxicologist who explained in plain terms what the substance in Dempsey's system could do to judgment and perception at the levels recorded in his test. The expert described how the impairment could affect a person's ability to assess situations accurately, regulate emotion, and respond proportionally to what was happening in front of them.
The defense tried to argue that the substance might have been consumed after the incident rather than before it. The toxicology evidence presented at trial established timing that contradicted that theory, and the expert held firm under cross-examination.
The jury deliberated for two days and returned guilty verdicts on every charge: assault involving a minor, false arrest, being on duty under the influence of a controlled substance, filing a false incident report, and misconduct in public office. The defense had spent five days trying to separate the encounter into pieces, asking jurors to treat the initial suspicion, the movement toward the pocket, the tackle, the report, and the medication as independent issues. The prosecution's position was that the evidence made more sense when seen as one continuous chain of decisions, beginning with an unsupported assumption and ending with a report that described the phone movement as something the video did not support. The jury accepted that account across all five counts.
Five convictions were delivered in sequence in a courtroom that was full for the reading of each one.
The judge sentenced Dempsey at a hearing that drew press coverage from across the state. The sentence imposed was two years for the assault involving a minor, 18 months consecutive for the false arrest, two years consecutive for being on duty under the influence, 18 months consecutive for the false incident report, and two years consecutive for misconduct in public office.
The total sentence was nine years. The judge recommended that Dempsey serve at least six before being considered for release. At sentencing, the emphasis was not only on the seconds of physical force in the park, but on the authority attached to Dempsey's badge, the fact that Austin was a minor, the false description of the phone movement, and the institutional trust damaged by an officer acting while impaired. The court treated the case as more than one bad decision made in a tense moment. It treated it as a sequence of choices whose consequences had been amplified by the power Dempsey carried.
His law-enforcement certification was permanently revoked the same day the sentence was delivered. He would never be permitted to work in law enforcement again.
The civil lawsuits settled three weeks after the criminal conviction. The department's legal team had reviewed the evidence after the verdict and reached the conclusion that a civil trial would produce a result at least as damaging as settlement. The broader liability created by allowing Dempsey to remain on patrol while impaired increased the department's exposure beyond the individual encounter itself.
The settlement totaled $1 million. Austin's family received $650,000. Chloe's family received $350,000. The division reflected the different harms alleged in the two cases. Austin had been physically taken to the ground, restrained, handcuffed, and placed in the cruiser. Chloe had watched the encounter unfold after repeatedly telling Dempsey his premise was wrong, had called 911 for help against the actions of an officer already on scene, and had been forced to keep explaining the same basic fact while Austin sat detained nearby.
Neither settlement included a nondisclosure requirement because both families refused to sign anything preventing them from speaking publicly about what had happened.
The department implemented mandatory random drug testing for officers on active patrol as a direct result of the case. The policy was included in the settlement agreement as a binding commitment rather than a voluntary reform. The testing program was overseen by an independent medical body rather than by the department itself.
New protocols were also established requiring supervisors to assess officer conduct in real time and remove an officer from patrol when behavior during a shift raised credible concerns about fitness for duty. The settlement language made the reform more than a press-release promise. It required a system for documenting those interventions and made the random-testing program independent enough that the department could not quietly ignore a result it found inconvenient. The goal was to catch problems before a civilian encounter became the event that finally forced everyone to look backward through the warning signs.
The three prior complaints against Dempsey that had been reviewed and minimized became the centerpiece of a broader examination of how the department handled complaint patterns. That review produced a restructured complaint process with mandatory escalation timelines and consequences for repeated substantiated complaints.
Austin Dixon used a portion of the settlement to establish a small fund that paid legal consultation fees for Black teenagers and their families who experienced racial profiling by law enforcement in their city. He named it after the date of the incident, not because he wanted to remember what had happened, but because he wanted other families to have access to what his own family had been fortunate enough to already have when it happened to them. His father had been able to call an attorney from the park within minutes. Austin understood later how unusual that kind of immediate access could be for another teenager's family. The fund was deliberately modest and practical: consultations, early legal advice, help understanding complaint procedures, and assistance preserving records before they disappeared into ordinary administrative delay.
When Austin finished his senior year of high school the following spring and graduated, his father stood in the audience with the particular pride of a man who had watched his son be treated as less than he was and had fought to make sure the treatment had consequences.
Chloe spoke at a school assembly about what she had witnessed and about what it meant to her that her words had been dismissed entirely by an officer who had already decided what he was seeing before asking a single question. She said being told repeatedly by an adult in authority that she was being forced to say Austin was her boyfriend was something she thought about often. It had changed how she understood certain things about the world.
Five years after the incident, Dempsey was still serving his sentence. Austin was in his second year of college. The event had not become the only thing in Austin's life, and his family had worked hard to make sure it did not. But neither had it vanished into the past simply because the lawsuits and trial ended. It remained one of those experiences a person learns to carry differently over time: no longer the center of every day, but still capable of returning with unusual clarity when a police cruiser slowed nearby or when someone reached casually into a pocket during an ordinary conversation.
The department's random drug-testing program had been in place for four years and had identified two additional officers with undisclosed substance issues before either had been involved in an incident with a civilian. The body-camera footage from Riverside Park was being used in law-enforcement training programs in three states as an example of how racial bias combined with impaired judgment can produce outcomes that destroy careers, cost departments millions of dollars, and leave teenagers with injuries and memories that no apology can erase.