fontana pd – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Police Chief Tries To Defend Torturing A Mentally Ill Man Into Confessing To Committing A Murder That Never Happened

from the too-awful-to-ever-admit-fault dept

Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD “investigators” spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn’t been committed… by anybody.

After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. — who suffers from several health and mental issues — decided to the do the thing you’re supposed to do: report the missing person to law enforcement. The Fontana PD decided to treat this plea for help as an admission of guilt. Rather than devote resources to locating the missing man, investigators ganged up on Perez Jr., going so far as telling him his father was dead, strongly suggesting Perez Jr. had murdered him, and threatening to kill his pet dog (which was in the interrogation room with Perez Jr.) by having it “euthanized” as a “stray.”

Investigators secured the murder confession they wanted. Unfortunately for them, Perez Jr.’s father had already been found alive by his sister, who met him at the Oakland airport to pick him up from his flight to see her. She then informed the Fontana PD of these inconvenient facts, which only then decided to stop treating Perez Jr. as a murder suspect.

Perez Jr. sued and the federal court denied qualified immunity to the involved police officers, saying this in its June 2023 decision:

There is no legitimate government interest that would justify treating Perez in this manner while he was in medical distress, since the FPD already had two warrants to search his person and property, and he was already essentially in custody and unable to flee or tamper with any evidence.

[…]

Perez’s substantive due process right against psychological torture of this nature was “clearly established” at the time of the incident, to a degree that “every reasonable officer would have understood that what he was doing violates that right.”

With immunity denied and the violations so immediately egregious, the city decided to cut a check, rather than keep defending awful officers in court.

But that’s not the end of this story. Fontana Police Chief Michael Dorsey has decided — months after the lawsuit was settled — to defend his officers’ actions that resulted in a lawsuit that cost Fontana residents nearly $1 million dollars. And, of course, he went to the one of the bastions of “free speech,” ExTwitter, to sound off at length about the alleged “injustice” his officers and his PD “suffered” due to factual press coverage of Perez Jr.’s lawsuit, along with defending psychological torture in general as a law enforcement interrogation tool. (h/t Chris Perez of Law & Crime)

It’s all garbage but here are the worst parts of it, which include the parts that portray the PD’s actions as more forgivable than the presiding federal judge ruled they were:

Dear Neighbor, Our police department recently settled a lawsuit that generated misleading, one-sided headlines, telling the story from the point-of-view of the plaintiff’s attorney. In the interest of transparency, accountability, fairness and maintaining community trust, I wanted the community to have the facts. I understand how difficult it is to be heard through all the noise these days. This was a missing person’s case where officers and detectives followed unfolding evidence that pointed toward possible foul play. Fortunately, the man was ultimately located, alive and well. In the settlement agreement, the judge on the case noted that a reasonable juror would agree that officers had sufficient evidence to suspect a crime had been committed.

Not all that recently, actually. The settlement was paid in May. On November 7, Chief Dorsey decided enough time had passed he could try to un-besmirch his investigators by playing to the largely law enforcement-friendly crowd that remains on ExTwitter.

The plaintiff’s story is the one that matters when lawsuits are filed. Until the defendant presents evidence otherwise, the plaintiff’s version is the one courts side with. If the Fontana PD wanted to introduce evidence, it should never have asked for qualified immunity to be applied to the officers for their actions. If it wanted to introduce a competing narrative, it needed to allow the lawsuit to move forward and be placed in front of a jury, instead of grabbing for QI parachutes immediately after being served. It didn’t do this. And it’s extremely disingenuous to claim the court (and the journalists outlets reporting on the proceeding) didn’t have “all the facts.” The PD undercut its chance to present competing facts by trying to get out the lawsuit early. That the denial of QI resulted in a fast settlement doesn’t make the plaintiff wrong, nor does it make the reporting on the lawsuit’s allegations false.

Not only that, but interrogation recordings exist that undercut Chief Dorsey’s claims that the plaintiff’s allegations were exaggerated:

The last sentence of that paragraph says the court said a “reasonable jury” could believe the police had probable cause to perform a search and effect an arrest. But what’s not mentioned in Dorsey’s self-serving statement is that the court also said this same “reasonable jury” would also conclude the investigators engaged in “unconstitutional psychological torture” of Perez Jr. to coerce a bogus confession. That’s why he scored a settlement. And, unfortunately, that’s the same reason Chief Dorsey is mouthing off on social media.

It’s time to defend “unconstitutional psychological torture,” says Chief Dorsey of the Fontana Police Department:

In situations like these, it is acceptable and perfectly legal to use different tactics and techniques, such as ruses, to elicit information from people suspected of potential criminal activity. That was done in this case in order to gain resolution.

Oh, ok. But you’re wrong about “acceptable.” This definitely isn’t, even if it may be ultimately legal, in some cases. Unfortunately for you and your department, a federal court also said this was illegal. You have absolutely no legal ground to stand on when making this assertion. And you’re misreading the American room if you think it’s “acceptable” to torture someone by holding them for 17 hours (while simultaneously suggesting Perez Jr. was completely aware he could leave at any), battering them verbally by accusing them of murder, lying about a crime that never occurred, and threatening to have their pet put down unless the accused agreed to confess to a murder of a person who was still alive.

City Pays $900k To Man Tortured Into Confessing Committing A Murder That Never Happened

from the thin-evil-line dept

Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his “missing” father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed.

Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they’d help him, rather than hurt him. That initiated nearly a full 24-hour day of extreme coercion by so-called “investigators.” Perez was concerned because his father had taken the dog for a walk around 10 pm on August 7, 2018 but had never returned home.

Instead of searching for the missing father, the cops went after Perez. The details of this interrogation — as relayed by the excellent reporting of Tony Saavedra — are horrifying:

According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.

Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

The officers not only leveraged the family dog against Perez, they ignored his medical and mental health issues. They refused to allow him access to medication to treat his high blood pressure, asthma, and depression. They actually laughed as they watched him suffer through immense anguish as they threatened to kill his dog and continued to insist he was a murderer.

This is from last June’s decision denying qualified immunity to the police officers:

At one point while they are telling him to confess, he starts pulling at his own hair, hitting himself, making anguished noises, tears off his own shirt, and nearly falls to the floor. During this episode, the officers laugh at him and tell him that he is stressing out his dog.

They also straight up lied to him. They told him his father’s body had already been found. But that would have been impossible because Perez’s father wasn’t dead. It was only after Perez’s sister located their father and informed the police of this fact.

Perez’s nightmare ended shortly after police got a phone call from his sister, who said their father was alive and well. He had actually walked to the train station in Fontana and rode the line to Los Angeles County to visit a relative and then took a bus to visit a female friend, Steering said. Perez Sr. later went to the airport to await a flight to Oakland to visit his daughter.

Police picked up the father at the airport and brought him to the Fontana station.

Somehow, that still didn’t end the cops’ interest in Perez. They obtained a warrant to search Perez’s house for evidence of an “assault” of an “unknown victim.” This was apparently justified by the discovery of blood during the execution of another warrant (the blood was later determined to be the result of Perez’s father’s blood tests for his diabetes” and the cops’ dog’s supposed “detection” of the odor of a “corpse” in the house).

Since cops like these ones tend to believe the first or easiest-to-nab suspect must be the guilty party, Fontana (CA) residents will now be paying $900,000 to cover the tab of officers — three of whom are still employed by the PD — who tortured a man into confessing to a crime that never actually happened.

And it’s not as though these cops ever admitted to doing anything wrong, despite the fact that the interrogation was captured on film, making it impossible to deny they did the awful things they did to Perez. Instead, they thought they should be allowed to walk away from this lawsuit because (in their own words) no reasonable officer would understand that torturing a man, accusing him of crimes that never happened, threatening to kill his dog, and denying him access to needed medication might be a violation of his rights.

From last June’s decision, which says things you’d think no one would actually have to say to law enforcement officers:

There is no legitimate government interest that would justify treating Perez in this manner while he was in medical distress, since the FPD already had two warrants to search his person and property, and he was already essentially in custody and unable to flee or tamper with any evidence.

[…]

Perez’s substantive due process right against psychological torture of this nature was “clearly established” at the time of the incident, to a degree that “every reasonable officer would have understood that what he was doing violates that right.”

That’s the only reason the city is paying. And it’s only getting around to it now, after managing to drag out litigation for nearly another entire year. But there was no way putting this case in front of a jury would have ended with an exoneration of the involved officers. So, to save them and their apparently ongoing careers, the city has graciously decided city residents should pay for the sins of city employees.

Filed Under: california, coercion, false confession, fontana, fontana pd, murder, qualified immunity, thomas perez jr.