police brutality – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Cop/Substitute Teacher Reenacts George Floyd Murder With Black Student, Says ‘Police Brutality Isn’t Real’
from the remedial-ACAB dept
Not all cops are terrible people, but a whole lot of terrible people seem to be cops.
For some reason, a police officer (who has not been officially identified by the district) has a side gig as a substitute English teacher. I don’t know what qualifications this officer brings to that job, but absolutely none of them were on display last week, when he earned himself a permanent ban from the district for “teaching” anything but English to an English class at Woodbury High School. (h/t Chris Ingraham)
A substitute teacher has been banned from a Twin Cities metro area school district after reportedly using a student to reenact the police actions that led to the murder of George Floyd.
The teacher also reportedly made racist and sexist comments to students at Woodbury High School on Monday, among other actions that prompted school officials to remove him from the school.
“It was very disturbing to us as a school district that something like that would ever occur in one of our classrooms,” South Washington County Schools Superintendent Julie Nielsen told MPR’s Minnesota Now on Wednesday, adding that in more than 30 years as an educator, “I have never heard of such poor judgment in a classroom.”
We’ve always taken the position that putting cops in schools is a generally terrible idea, but that was in the context of cops handling the disciplinary issues that have been historically handled by teachers, parents, and school administrators. Going forward, we will be taking the position that putting cops in classrooms as instructors is generally a terrible idea, pretty much entirely because of this guy: Officer Steven Dwight Williams of the Prescott, Wisconsin police department (as reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) has been outed by his employer, which has placed him on administrative leave. What he was doing offering his dubious English teaching skills to a school in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota is anyone’s guess.
That being said, the reporting from MPR leaves something to be desired in terms of its cop-washing of the most eye-grabbing part of Officer Williams’ teaching methods: “reenact the police actions that led to the murder of George Floyd.” No, he absolutely performed the very act that murdered George Floyd, using a Black high school student to represent the Black adult murdered by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. Much like Chauvin, Officer Williams’ reenactment of a murder performed by a police officer was captured by a bystander’s phone:
But even that line is better than the phrase used in the Woodbury News Net’s coverage of this debacle:
Substitute Teacher Banned After Allegedly Reenacting George Floyd Restraint At Woodbury High
First, there’s footage of the incident and the verification of every student in the class. There’s also the letter sent to parents of students at the school, which affirms this did, in fact, happen. Finally, calling a murder a “restraint” may be technically accurate, but it downplays the insanity of this reenactment, which was performed by a cop, utilizing a Black student. It’s like teaching history by “reenacting” a lynching — but at least in that case, it might have something to do with the subject being taught. This ain’t English. And neither is anything else that fell out of that cop’s mouth during what is hopefully his final substitute teacher job ever.
This is from the letter/email sent to parents by the district, which includes a long list of other terrible things Officer Williams did during the four classes he taught that day.
During class time, some of the things students reported were that the substitute teacher:
● Put a student on the ground in front of the class as part of a reenactment of the police actions that resulted in the murder of George Floyd. ● Twisted a student’s arm behind the student’s back and showed pressure points on the chin and face. ● Spoke about a bar fight and fake punched a student with his fist “really close” to the student’s face. ● “Invaded students’ space” and mimicked holding up a gun and pointing it at students. ● Repeatedly made racially-harmful comments. ● Told sexist jokes. ● Spoke in disturbing detail about dead bodies he had seen, and shared explicit details about two sexual assault cases he investigated. ● Shared specific names of people he arrested. ● Stated that “cops would be the best criminals” and that “they know how to get away with stuff,” stating that he once got an “A” on a paper about how to get away with murder. ● Spoke at length about his gun collection. ● Stated that “police brutality isn’t real.”
That’s insane. Unless the purpose of the class was to instruct students that cops are terrible, untrustworthy people, there’s no way anyone came away from these classes with a better understanding of the subject matter. And I can only imagine how horrified the person Officer Williams replaced must be at this development, if only because it’s clear he didn’t follow the lesson plans they left for him.
How this guy has held down this side gig for multiple years is beyond my comprehension. This can’t be the only time he decided to regale classes with his cop-centric view of the world. Or maybe this was just the day he decided he wanted to get fired and decided to drag four consecutive classes down with him. Either way, more schools should probably start running background checks on their substitute teacher rosters. Administrators probably assumed someone with a law enforcement background would be a solid pick for open teaching slots. That assumption has now been completely undermined by one officer’s actions. Maybe no other cop/sub would do things this officer did. But as cops themselves will tell you when they’re trying to impose their will on you, better safe than sorry.
Filed Under: george floyd, minnesota, police brutality, school cops, steven williams, woodbury high school
New York PD Is Training Officers That Someone Saying ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is Just ‘Excited Delirium’
from the whatever-gets-your-guys-off,-I-guess dept
Excited delirium just won’t go away. No medical association recognizes this condition as factually true. And no cop shop will ever move away from using it as a handy excuse for in-custody killings, at least not until forced to by state legislators.
Excited delirium actually pre-dates its current status as the go-to excuse for cops when they kill someone. Even then, it was questionable. But it really took off when Taser started supplying officers with tasers, which were immediately linked to several in-custody deaths, despite being advertised as a “less-than-lethal” force option. Taser’s lawyers (and supposed medical experts) offered testimony claiming people restrained or electrocuted to death were actually dying of a completely unrelated medical condition.
This was taken as gospel by cops who didn’t want to be held accountable for killing people — especially people who were suffering from mental health issues and, in most cases, were unarmed when multiple officers delivered electric shocks and/or piled on top of their prone bodies until they suffocated.
One of the most infamous murders committed by a cop — the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — had its own “excited delirium” nexus. Officer Thomas Lane, who watched Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, put on this performance for his body camera as he did nothing to prevent the killing he was witnessing:
I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.
“Or whatever.” And define “worry,” since it clearly didn’t mean offering any medical assistance whatsoever to the person this cop exoneratively declared might be suffering from a medical condition only cited by cops in the aftermath of an in-custody killing.
Four years ago, documents obtained by a public records requester showed the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD was filling officers’ heads with disinformation — not only claiming “excited delirium” was a legitimate medical condition, but also that people who literally could not breathe due to officers’ restraint tactics were just informing officers of this so-called medical condition when they said they were having difficulty breathing. Listed among the “symptoms” of “excited delirium” were these:
Says “I can’t breathe”, “I’m dying”, “You’re killing me.”
Since then, some things have changed. Officer Chauvin murdered George Floyd and, in an unexpected development, was actually convicted of murder. In a few localities, officials have passed laws forbidding officers or coroners from citing excited delirium as the cause of death.
The last holdouts in the medical profession have finally agreed “excited delirium” is a BS diagnosis, primarily because the only people who ever make this medical conclusion wear badges and have recently killed people, almost all of them unarmed.
But the Rochester, New York Police Department still wants to treat excited delirium as a legitimate medical condition. Of course, that’s only because it gives officers an out when they’ve killed someone and definitely not because anyone on or off the force actually believes it’s anything more than a handy excuse for police brutality.
Training materials obtained by Jenny Wadhwa and uploaded to MuckRock contain the usual excited delirium bullshit, along with a PowerPoint slide [PDF] that says the same thing the Charlotte PD’s training materials say: people saying “I can’t breathe” are just in the (life-threatening) throes of an excited delirium episode:
Also fun to note is that the term “unlimited endurance” is declared a symptom when all it actually means is that the person being restrained managed to tire out some of the out-of-shape cops who responded to the scene. And I’m not just making generalizations about cops, donuts, and the fact that most of them spend most of their hours sitting in cars. It’s a fact: most cops can be worn down by anyone in semi-decent physical shape.
Although the physical requirements of police work suggest the importance of maintaining a healthy weight status, recent research suggests that 40.5% of American police officers are obese3),which is a prevalence rate above the national average of 35.5% for adult men and 35.8% for adult women4)
In this context, “superhuman strength” and “unlimited endurance” should probably just be read as “regular human strength” and “regular human endurance.”
In fact, the so-called “training” is best read as an exhortation to commit violence while providing officers with an exonerative cover story. The slides say it can be triggered by the use of either illegal or legal drugs.
Death usually follows a bizarre behavior episode and/ or use of illegal drugs or prescription medication
In practice, this means literally any chemical substance found in the body during a coroner’s examination can be used to buttress “excited delirium” claims.
It also claims there are four stages in the “excited delirium” progression, with the end result being apparently inevitable.
- Elevated body temperature
- Agitation
- Respiratory arrest
- Death
But that does nothing to explain why people only die of “excited delirium” after being tased/restrained/brutalized by cops. No one has ever reported someone just died of “excited delirium” without the application of force by police officers. So, even if we were so careless as to accept the theory of “excited delirium” as a legitimate medical condition, it would be even more careless to immediately discount this outside factor that is present in 100% of excited delirium deaths.
This isn’t training — at least not in the sense those of us in the private sector are used to. What’s being imparted here is a justification for excessive force deployment and a preconceived narrative for in-custody killings. We would be legitimately upset to discover companies are training employees how to dodge regulatory oversight and provide them with immediate plausible deniability for their actions. We should be way more upset that people paid with our tax dollars are literally encouraging police brutality by preemptively providing police officers with a pseudo-scientific explanation for the killings they may decide to commit.
Filed Under: excited delirium, new york, police brutality, police training, rochester police
Companies: axon, taser
With Multiple Deputies Headed To Jail, Sheriff Vows To Get To Bottom Of ‘Goon Squad’ Horror Show He Ignored For Years
from the fox-to-henhouse:-what-up dept
Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time.
This all began because a “helpful” Mississippi resident called the cops because they had witnessed the most Mississippi of crimes: black men hanging out with a white woman. What went on from there not only chills the blood, but triggers the gag reflex:
During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.
[…]
DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.
[…]
M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.
[…]
Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.
At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.
[…]
ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.
ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.
ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.
I want to set the scene for what’s been happening since then. The six members of the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” are all now facing jail time. The sheriff who oversaw this group (and by “oversaw,” I mean “ignored”) has not only received a raise that makes him the highest paid law enforcement official in the state, but is now pretending he’s capable of cleaning this mess up.
And who better to do this than the sheriff who, in 2014, abused the subpoena process to dig up info on his girlfriend. He presented a subpoena for phone records to the local DA under the pretense that he was requesting general info to present to a grand jury. But the phone records request targeted his girlfriend (who was cuurently married to someone else) and the school employee the sheriff believed she was romantically involved with. An investigation was opened, but it dead-ended after the chairman of the (LOL) House Committee on Ethics recused himself because of his “years-long friendship” with the sheriff. It was then passed on to the state attorney general who simply decided not to pursue it.
Another bombshell of bad press has rocked the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department still run by ethically-challenged sheriff Bryan Bailey. A collaborative report produced by the New York Times and Mississippi Today uncovered messages sent between deputies in the “Goon Squad” WhatsApp group.
As can be assumed from the description of the atrocities committed by Goon Squad members in the only case they’re currently facing prison time for, the contents of these messages is more of the same:
Some of the messages discuss brutalizing and demeaning suspects, as well as exchanging disturbing crime scene photos and pictures of “rotting corpses,” the report said.
In one exchange from a 2022 domestic violence arrest, then-Deputy Hunter Elward wrote, “Did you Tase him in the face!?”
Fellow Goon Squad member Daniel Opdyke asked if they had shocked the man in the anus.
Another deputy said the suspect would have “gotten more lovings,” seeming to indicate they held back because of potential witnesses, saying, “All the neighbors were outside watching.”
Chat members also “discussed taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested,” the Times reported.
Another exchange discusses deputies getting “points” for shooting someone.
One member of this chat group has already opted for the “locker room talk” defense popularized by convicted felon Donald Trump:
One member of the group chat, who no longer works for the sheriff’s department, called his messages “absolutely all jokes,” in an interview with the New York Times.
Huh. Well, they don’t look like “jokes.” Jokes are supposed to be funny. Were these messages only funny because they were true? Because, given what’s reported, the “jokes” referenced acts of violence Goon Squad members actually committed. If these were jokes, they were in-jokes that were only funny in the context of habitual acts of torture and violence committed by members of the Goon Squad group.
The state should be jumping in here to take the lead on an independent investigation of the members of this chat group. But it hasn’t done that, which has allowed none other than Sheriff Bryan Bailey to get a head start on exonerating himself, if not the rest of chat group participants not currently serving federal prison time.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office says it will conduct a review and analysis after a Wednesday report from The New York Times and Mississippi Today detailed messages in an encrypted WhatsApp group chat between known “Goon Squad” members and other law enforcement officers, some of whom are still employed by the county.
[…]
Neither the department nor Sheriff Bryan Bailey “knew of the existence of ‘a shift of officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ until a bill of information was filed in federal court,” the sheriff’s office statement said.
Bullshit. If the sheriff was truly unaware of the existence of a “Goon Squad” or the violent tactics of its members, he’s either incompetent or a liar. The acts committed by these officers were not the acts of officers who went a little off the rails when dealing with violent or extremely hostile arrestees. These are the acts of officers who felt truly comfortable torturing their fellow human beings, secure in the knowledge they would most likely get away with it — either because their boss was bad at his job or was willing to ignore their criminal acts. Neither is a good look for the person who’s supposed to be on top of everything happening in his department.
If Sheriff Bailey actually cared about this, he would have asked for an outside law enforcement agency to handle this “review and analysis.” If the state cared at all about this, it would have already initiated an independent investigation utilizing its Inspector General’s office or, at the very least, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Although the latter is still a law enforcement agency and just as prone to look for reasons to exonerate fellow officers, it still wouldn’t be the extremely compromised Sheriff Bailey pretending he can provide a competent investigation of stuff he was either too stupid or too corrupt to notice despite running this department for more than a decade.
Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, mississippi, police, police brutality, police violence, rankin county
Black Cop Beaten By White Cops Awarded More Than $23 Million In Damages
from the police-on-police-violence dept
Cops will apparently beat their own, especially if they’re bigoted cops and willing to beat the next black person they see. St. Louis police officer was working undercover during protests following the acquittal of Officer Jason Stockley, who had been charged with murder for the killing of a black St. Louis resident, Anthony Lamar Smith.
Officer Hall was just doing his police work when he happened upon five members of the PD’s “Civil Disobedience Team.” Civil disobedience was apparently their directive, not their purview. Four of the officers threw Hall to the ground and beat him severely. All four officers were ultimately indicted and put on trial for the beating of their fellow officer.
One of those officers, Dustin Boone, made an appearance here at Techdirt back in 2021. During his criminal trial, his lawyer objected to the prosecution’s introduction of his racist text messages as evidence of his intent to do harm to Officer Hall… or at least anyone else who looked like him. They’re quite the read.
It’s already a state of emergency! There are r niggers running wild all across the city and even if/when we catch them….. they don’t get in any trouble because there are plate lips running the CAO!
That was sent to a group text that included several other St. Louis police officers. This one was sent to a group text including the names “Kayla, Kelsea, Mom, Ashley Marie, Dad:”
What city r we in?
These fuckin niggers r the same as St. Louis niggers.
The good news is most of the cops involved ended up serving time for this beating.
Boone was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison after being convicted by a jury of a single civil rights charge. [Christopher] Myers was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to a single felony charge, and [Bailey] Colletta got probation for lying to the FBI and a grand jury about the attack. [Steven] Korte was acquitted of the charges against him.
The former officer being hit with a $23 million settlement is Randy Hays, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years and four months in prison. Hall’s lawsuit was served to Hays while he was still incarcerated, but Hays failed to respond to it.
So, the judgment here is a default judgment. And while Hays may have had plenty of time to respond to it, thanks to having nowhere else to go until his time was served, he probably didn’t have a lot of available cash to hire a lawyer to fight the lawsuit. Plus, he had already pleaded guilty and admitted to taking part in the beating, so there weren’t a whole lot of options available to defend himself with.
Hays will have a year to challenge this default judgment. He probably won’t. While it may look like justice, it’s incredibly unlikely Hays has anywhere near $23 million in assets. And with an actual federal felony on his record, his employment options will be limited. (I mean, at least outside of law enforcement.)
Hall still has a pending lawsuit against Meyers and Boone. And he’s already secured a settlement from the city for $5 million, so at least he’s getting something out of this beyond two titanium plates in his neck, the removal of his gall bladder, a fused vertebrae, and a deep distrust of law enforcement. That’s how his 22-year career as a cop ended: as the victim of a beating delivered by some members of the “Thin Blue Line” who suddenly decided a black man they didn’t immediately recognize must be on the wrong side of the line.
Filed Under: civil suit, police, police brutality, st. louis
Emmett Till All Over Again: Six White Mississippi Cops Plead Guilty To Beating, Torturing Two Black Men
from the crime-of-being-black-while-existing dept
The more things change, etc. We’ll never fully reject this country’s racist history if we insist on stocking our police departments with racists. The horrific events described here do not exist in a vacuum. The officers who felt comfortable doing these things felt comfortable for several reasons.
First, there’s the long history of racist policing, which means cops who oppress minorities seldom suffer the consequences of their actions. Then there’s qualified immunity, which means cops have to veer far over constitutional lines to even be held responsible for their actions. And, in most cases, cops who do these things are indemnified, which means they’re never actually personally responsible for their actions. It’s the people they’re supposed to serve who actually foot the bill.
Then there’s cop culture in general, which teaches cops that every person who isn’t a cop is a potential threat and that everyone who isn’t a cop isn’t qualified to opine on, much less alter, standard cop behavior.
Beyond that, there are police unions: powerful entities capable of persuading legislators to leave cops alone, no matter how much abusive behavior they’ve engaged in.
On top of this discordant, useless mess is the DOJ, which can open investigations, secure consent decrees, and expose years of unconstitutional practices. But, in the end, the targets of DOJ investigations have to want to change to actually effect any changes. Almost none of them do.
Welcome to Mississippi, 1955. Emmett Till was accused by a white woman of whistling at her and grabbing her hand while she shopped in a local store. Because of this (unverified) claim, locals took it upon themselves to do this to Emmett Till:
In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, sometime between 2 and 3:30 a.m., Bryant and Milam drove to Mose Wright’s house. Milam was armed with a pistol and a flashlight. He asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from Chicago. Till was sharing a bed with another cousin and there were a total of eight people in the cabin. Milam asked Wright to take them to “the nigger who did the talking”. Till’s great-aunt offered the men money, but Milam refused as he rushed Emmett to put on his clothes.
[…]
They tied up Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi. According to some witnesses, they took Till back to Bryant’s Groceries and recruited two black men. The men then drove to a barn in Drew. They pistol-whipped him on the way and reportedly knocked him unconscious.
[…]
Three days after his abduction and murder, Till’s swollen and disfigured body was found by two boys who were fishing in the Tallahatchie River. His head was very badly mutilated, he had been shot above the right ear, an eye was dislodged from the socket, there was evidence that he had been beaten on the back and the hips, and his body weighted by a fan blade, which was fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was nude, but wearing a silver ring with the initials “L. T.” and “May 25, 1943” carved in it. His face was unrecognizable due to trauma and having been submerged in water.
Welcome to Mississippi, 2023. Little has changed other than the year. Till was abducted, beaten, tortured, and killed for the crime of existing in the vicinity of white women. The victims of this latest round of brutality were guilty of the same thing: existing in the vicinity of a white woman.
A white neighbor phoned Rankin County Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman inside a Braxton home. McAlpin told Deputy Christian Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies so willing to use excessive force they called themselves “The Goon Squad.”
“Are y’all available for a mission?” Dedmon asked. They were.
What you’re about to read is highly disturbing. The most disturbing thing about this is that US police culture led directly to the horrific violations described rather dryly by this DOJ press release:
The defendants admitted that on Jan. 24, without a warrant or any exigent circumstances, they kicked in the door and entered a home in Braxton, Rankin County, Mississippi where two Black men, M.J. and E.P., were residing. The defendants handcuffed and arrested the men without probable cause to believe they had committed any crime, called them racial slurs, and warned them to stay out of Rankin County. Further, the defendants punched and kicked the men, tased them 17 times, forced them to ingest liquids, and assaulted them with a dildo. During the incident, Dedmon fired his gun twice to intimidate the men.
At the conclusion of the incident, Elward surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun, forced the gun into M.J.’s mouth and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not fire. Elward racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When Elward pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.
As M.J. was bleeding on the floor, the defendants did not provide medical aid, but instead gathered outside the home to devise a false cover story and took steps to corroborate it, including: planting a gun on M.J.; destroying surveillance video, spent shell casings, and taser cartridges; submitting fraudulent drug evidence to the crime lab; filing false reports; charging M.J. with crimes he did not commit; making false statements to investigators; and pressuring witnesses to stick to the cover story. Three of the defendants admitted in court that they were members of “The Goon Squad,” a group of RCSO officers who were known for using excessive force and not reporting it.
This describes the actions of five former officers of the Rankin County, Mississippi Sheriff’s Office. These are the names of the culprits: Chief Investigator Brett McAlpin, Narcotics Investigator Christian Dedmon, Lt. Jeffrey Middleton, Deputy Hunter Elward, and Deputy Daniel Opdyke. All of these officers pled guilty to the charges against them.
The charging document [PDF] sheds more light on the disturbing details behind the horrific act, including the fact that these officers had formed their own (publicly acknowledged) “Goon Squad” for the sole purpose of engaging in constitutional violations.
DEDMON reached out to a shift of officers who called themselves “The Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it.
This group knew their actions were illegal. That’s why they took steps to avoid being caught by anything that might undercut their narrative following their illegal acts.
DEDMON messaged the group that they were going to the property on Conerly Road, and warned them: “There is a chance [of] cameras… let’s approach east and work eas[y].” The defendants understood “work easy” to mean knock on the door, rather than kick it down. ELWARD texted back an eyeroll emoji, and OPDYKE texted a .gif of a baby crying.
More communication about cameras ensued. So did a discussion about “no bad mugshots,” which was understood to mean any violence perpetrated on the black men should avoid their faces.
Arriving at the property, the officers avoided the visible surveillance camera at the front of the house. Two officers kicked in the carport door, while another walked around to the back door, which did not have a camera observing it. Officers enter through these doors. No one had a warrant. Once inside, the violence began.
Both black men were handcuffed. While handcuffed, they were tased multiple times. E.P. was kicked in the ribs by Opdyke. Dedmon brandished his weapon, asked about the location of drugs, and fired a round into the wall of the home where both M.J. and E.P. (the initials given to the men brutalized by these inhuman officers) were being held captive by the “Goon Squad,” apparently for their failure to immediately provide evidence that would support the ongoing brutality.
Both men were moved to the living room by the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad.” The violence continued.
The defendants, all of whom are white, called M.J. and E.P. racial slurs, including “nigger,” “monkey,” and “boy;” accused them of taking advantage of the white woman who owned the house; and warned them to stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or to “their side” of the Pearl River — areas with higher concentrations of Black residents.
It gets so much worse.
During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.
[…]
DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.
Inhumanity, personified by a handful of “law enforcement officers,” a phrase I’m forced to put in quotes because nothing that happened here indicated they’re actually in the law enforcement business, much less deserving of this title.
M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.
After this assault, which included Elward throwing eggs at both Black men, they were ordered to shower to rid themselves of evidence of this abuse before being taken to jail.
But the abuse didn’t end there. Opdyke struck E.P. with a wooden spoon. Middleton hit E.P with a metal sword. Dedmon and McAlpin struck E.P. in the back with pieces of wood.
Sadism at every turn.
Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.
At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.
Two of the officers wandered off to steal stuff from the house, only to be interrupted by the sound of gunfire. This wasn’t the two men assaulting officers or escaping. This was only further torture perpetrated by armed officers of the law.
ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.
ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.
ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.
So much for “no bad mugshots.” While M.J. continued to bleed from this wound, the officers gathered on the porch and concocted a cover story. The officers agreed to say they had spotted M.J. outside the house, patted him down, and discovered baggies of meth. Then M.J. had run into the house, forcing the officers to pursue him.
Once inside the house, officers asked M.J. to perform a controlled drug buy over the phone. When M.J.’s handcuffs were removed to perform the call to purchase drugs, he had reached for a gun, forcing Elward to shoot him in the mouth.
The dildo was removed from the BB gun. This gun was placed next to M.J., who still wasn’t receiving any medical attention after being shot in the mouth by Elward. The officers then went to work on E.P., stating that he would be immediately released from jail if he was willing to corroborate the massive pile of lies the officers had concocted.
McAlpin left the scene to create GPS data that would corroborate the cover story. The clothes originally worn by the tortured men were thrown into the woods after proving to be too wet to be burned. Hartfield removed the hard drive storage for the home surveillance system and threw it into a nearby creek. Shell casings were removed from the house. Drugs in the possession of Dedmon were planted in the house. And McAlpin and Middleton threatened to kill any of the other officers who had willingly participated in this violence and torture if they suddenly had a crisis of conscience and ratted the others out.
These officers will all be going to jail. But it’s naïve to believe this means the worst of the worst has been rooted out. These are just the ones that got caught. And those who haven’t been caught likely feel just as comfortable regularly violating rights, even if they’re not quite as willing to go to these extremes. Cops have always protected cops, providing their tacit approval of constitutional violations. Every so often, though, officers go too far and end up paying the price. But the root problem still exists: a toxic combination of insularity and opacity that inevitably leads to horrific rights abuses even the worst of worst can’t openly condone.
Filed Under: braxton, brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, missippi, police, police brutality, rankin county
Everyone Makes Mistakes, But When Cops Make Mistakes, The Guns Come Out
from the this-is-just-how-we-do-it-here dept
There’s a massive gap between how the policed view “reasonable” policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to “serve and protect” seem to prefer the polar opposite.
We get opacity, violence, and insular behavior any time we question why cops need to treat even the most routine of interactions with implied — if not actual — deadly force.
And that dichotomy has once again been clearly illustrated by victims of undue force deployment. While this stop does involve a license plate, it does not involve the tech (automated license plate readers [ALPRs]) normally associated with suspicionless stops that soon escalate to guns-out encounters with “reasonably scared” law enforcement officers.
Instead, it deals with normal human error. But when cops screw up, it’s the people they serve who can end up dead. At the very least, human error by cop means the casual terrorizing of people who’ve done nothing wrong. And so, as is detailed here in this report by Rebecca Carballo for the New York Times, the end result is people who’ve probably never broken a law in their life being treated like violent felons by government employees who can’t even possibly imagine they’re in the wrong.
Demetria Heard was driving with her family from their home in Arkansas to a youth basketball tournament in the Dallas area on July 23 when she noticed that a police officer had been following her for several minutes.
She told herself it was probably nothing, but soon the siren was on and the cruiser’s lights were flashing. She pulled over, and the next thing she knew, an officer was pointing a gun at her Dodge Charger.
Body camera footage later released by the Police Department in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas, shows an officer ordering Ms. Heard to get out of the car and walk backward toward officers on the side of the closed freeway. Officers then instructed her son, who is in the sixth grade, to do the same.
These cops screwed up. But that didn’t stop them from doing what they did. The problem here? The officer entering the license plate number while trailing the car punched in “AZ” instead of “AR.” There’s a massive amount of miles between the two states and an even larger difference when it comes to entering license plate numbers.
It was only several minutes after ordering everyone out of the car at gunpoint that the officers discovered the error. And while it’s nice the department has offered an apology to the traumatized family, no one on the law enforcement side has even suggested officers should hold off on the deployment of (at least threatened) deadly force until they’re sure they’ve got all the (accurate) information they need.
Understandably, there’s a lawsuit on its way. The Fourth Amendment does not allow this behavior unless the officers can show they had reasonable suspicion to perform the stop and probable cause to escalate to detaining people at gunpoint.
The seemingly positive reactions from the involved officers and their employers are inextricably linked to public coverage of their actions. If they were truly concerned they’d screwed up, the officers and their department would have reached out long before this stop made national news.
Like I noted at the opening of this post, it’s human to err. (Forgiveness is still divine, so it’s not “reasonable” to expect that from anyone, especially the people who were manhandled at gunpoint because a cop punched in the wrong state code.) The difference is that, for most of us, our errors rarely lead to us pointing guns at other people with the implicit intent to kill. At best, most of us create minor inconveniences for coworkers and customers.
But law enforcement operates in an entirely different reality. While some of its actions can be justified by its law enforcement utility, many of its actions are propelled by so-called “training and expertise” that drills into officers the belief that everyone they interact with is a possible criminal, and likely a dangerous one at that. But even with our insane incarceration rate, the most logical conclusion is that 99% of people stopped by cops aren’t criminals. And that’s what should guide their responses, rather than the assertions of training personnel who choose to portray millions of innocent people as anthropomorphized loaded guns constantly aimed at the heads of the Boys in Blue.
For once, automated tech isn’t to blame for a guns-out traffic stop. But that’s hardly good news when human error results in the same reaction.
Filed Under: police, police brutality, police mistakes, police violence
Oversight Agency Says DHS Needs To Stop Screwing Around And Accurately Track Use Of Force By Officers
from the if-you-can-hit-people,-you-can-hit-a-keyboard dept
There are no incentives in place to encourage accurate reporting of force deployment by law enforcement agencies. Tracking use of force means agencies are basically generating evidence for civil rights lawsuits. That’s why force reporting is, at best, inconsistent.
At its worst, it’s simply dishonest. The lack of solid deterrents means agencies simply won’t generate this data, lest it be used against them at some point in time. Policy changes rarely change anything, since they’re almost always unmoored from any substantial form of punishment.
Sure, a few outliers might make a genuine effort to accurately report these numbers, but there’s no concerted or consistent effort being made by the vast majority of agencies affected by reforms, directives, policy changes, etc. that supposedly mandate accurate reporting on force deployment.
So, this report [PDF] from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reflects more of the same status quo. Directives and recommendations have been handed out for years, including more recent reform efforts mean to limit excessive force deployment. But no one’s actually making anyone comply. That’s how we end up with this:
On May 25, 2022, Executive Order 14,074 required the heads of federal law enforcement agencies, including DHS, to ensure their agencies’ use of force policies reflect principles of valuing and preserving human life and meet or exceed DOJ’s use of force policy.
[…]
While DHS requires the four agencies GAO reviewed to submit data on uses of force, the data submitted to DHS undercount the frequency that officers used force against subjects. For example, agencies sometimes submitted data to DHS that counted multiple reportable uses of force as a single “incident.”
To be sure, the cops (federal or not) brought this upon themselves. Two solid years of protests against police violence (provoked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin) forced the new presidential administration to roll back directives installed by its predecessor — someone who chose to believe it was the policed who were the actual problem.
Following high-profile deaths during law enforcement encounters and the subsequent public demonstrations in the summer of 2020, as well as events at the southern border in September 2021, the President signed an executive order on May 25, 2022, that addressed issues related to the use of force in federal law enforcement. The executive order noted the importance of strengthening trust between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve, as well as ensuring the criminal justice system serves and protects all people equally.
Well, you can’t rebuild trust if you’re unwilling to report force deployment accurately. And so, it appears DHS entities have a long way to go if they’re going to hold themselves up as examples worthy of being emulated.
The four agencies investigated by the GAO are no one’s idea of trustworthy. The CBP and ICE spent four years under Donald Trump erasing whatever goodwill they might have built up prior to his election. The Federal Protective Service flew under the radar until it was deployed to Portland, Oregon, where it promptly began brutalizing protesters, vanishing people off the street, and ignoring multiple court orders telling it to stop doing all of the above. And as for the US Secret Service, it’s never violated rights en masse, but it’s definitely home to multiple, still-unaddressed problems that range from moral turpitude to blatant obstruction.
The GAO’s previous examination led to a handful of recommendations. But despite having months (and all the money in taxpayers’ wallets) to do so, more than half of these DHS components had failed to anything more than promise to try to try.
As of February 2023, DHS had addressed our recommendation to develop standards for its agencies about what types of use of force should be reported but had not fully addressed the others. For example, it established a working group to oversee data collection, but that group had not yet developed monitoring mechanisms to ensure that reporting information is consistent and complete.
We also recommended that ICE and Secret Service modify their policies to ensure officials document the determinations of whether officers’ uses of force were within policy. As of February 2023, Secret Service had addressed GAO’s recommendation by issuing a new policy to document determinations, but ICE had not yet done so.
From what’s included in the report, it appears most of the agencies believed that mandates for use-of-force tracking meant they should do things like engage in more firearms certification, improve proficiency in less-lethal force deployment, say something nice about de-escalation for four hours a year, and avoid any discussion about implicit bias. Very little of the post-Executive Order efforts appear to actually be aimed at addressing the problem the EO was trying to address, i.e. abusive acts by federal officers.
Use-of-force reporting mandates are all over the place. Some federal officers are required to at least verbally report force deployment by the end of their shifts. ICE officers are required to “verbally” report this information within an hour of its occurrence. As for the permanent record, written reports are required anywhere from “by the end of shift” to 72 hours after the incident.
Because standards are inconsistent across DHS components and agencies/officers are rarely interested in accurately reporting their possible rights violations, the reported totals can’t be trusted.
Here’s how the Federal Protective Service (FPS) serves itself by under-reporting force deployment:
We found that officers sometimes report multiple uses of force in one report. For example, during demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, in February 2021, some individual officers used force multiple times during the course of an evening, but reported these uses to FPS on a single reporting form. In one case, over the course of 30 minutes, one officer deployed his less-lethal weapon three separate times, each time hitting a different individual. The officer reported these three uses of force to FPS in one report.
CBP does the same thing:
CBP data show that more than 1,700 use of force incidents occurred across the 2021-2022 fiscal year period. Of these, 291 incidents involved multiple officers using force, and 216 involved use of force against multiple subjects. For instance, in one encounter with migrants at the U.S. border, four officers reported using force on a group of 62 subjects. CBP recorded these uses of force as one incident.
Obviously, things need to change. The GAO (again) issues more recommendations, including additional reporting training for officers who are either unaware of the reporting requirements or simply choose to ignore them.
The problem is the GAO can’t actually make anyone in the government punish anyone else in the government for breaking the rules. So, it’s up to the DHS to do this. And if it won’t, it’s up to Congress. But if this has been a problem for years and recent social unrest has failed to move the dial, the obvious conclusion is that no one who can actually do anything about this wants to do anything about this.
Filed Under: dhs, gao, police brutality, police violence, use of force
Vallejo PD Takes So Long To Investigate Officers, They Often Kill Again Before Their First Investigations Are Closed
from the longer-you-delay,-the-longer-you-can-stonewall dept
The Vallejo PD kills people. That’s an undeniable fact. It does so with alarming frequency, considering the size of its force. Between 2010 and 2020, the PD’s officers killed 19 people. But the PD is uninterested in reducing the number of times its officers kill.
Vallejo police have killed 19 people since 2010, renewing calls for criminal justice reform and a request for federal oversight of the department.
None of the officers have been charged criminally for any of these shootings in the last decade, as each case was deemed justified because officers feared for their lives. Yet, many of their families say that police have acted with excessive force and have given false accounts about why they felt the need to shoot and kill their loved ones are false.
There may be a reason for this (beyond the obvious lack of accountability). Last March, a Vallejo PD whistleblower alleged officers were being informally rewarded for shooting citizens. A clique within the department regularly held celebratory barbecues to honor officers who’d shot people, bending the point of their badge tips to tally up killings in the line of duty..
The report, published by Open Vallejo, contained these disturbing details.
Open Vallejo cites the controversial shooting of Willie McCoy as the impetus for this anonymous whistleblowing. McCoy was shot by Vallejo police officers in a Taco Bell drive-thru, where he had apparently passed out. Restaurant employees called the PD, which sent officers to perform a wellness check. Instead of seeing whether anything was wrong with McCoy, officers surrounded the car and killed McCoy when he awoke and moved one arm towards his shoulder. Vallejo officers fired 55 rounds in less than 3.5 seconds, killing McCoy.
It wasn’t the first time Vallejo cops emptied their magazines into someone they were supposed to be arresting or helping. At the tail end of a chase involving an alleged robbery suspect, Vallejo officers shot the suspect — who was carrying a knife and slowly moving towards them — 41 times.
According to Open Vallejo’s source, one of McCoy’s killers — Officer Ryan McMahon — got a bend on his “star” for this shooting. This would be his second “bend” in less than a year.
According to the same source, nearly 40% of the department’s officers had been involved in at least one shooting.
A new investigation — published by ProPublica in conjunction with Open Vallejo — helps explain why the department is so prone to violence. A major contributor is the department itself, which shows almost no interest in holding officers accountable for excessive force deployment.
Now, Open Vallejo and ProPublica have looked at what happens inside the department after those killings occur, examining more than 15,000 pages of police, forensic, and court files related to the city’s 17 fatal police shootings since 2011. Based on records that emerged after dozens of public records requests and two lawsuits filed by Open Vallejo, the news organizations found a pattern of delayed and incomplete investigations, with dire consequences.
One of the cases cited is the killing of Ronell Foster, something that started with a stop for a minor traffic violation involving a bike, morphed into a tasing and beating of Foster, and ended with Officer Ryan McMahon shooting Foster seven times: four in the back, two in the side, and one in the head.
The department took 18 months to even get around to reviewing this case, ultimately finding only that McMahon had violated policy by escalating a minor traffic violation stop into a beating and killing. It recommended he be “punished” by attending a training course on officer safety and tactics. By that time, McMahon had already killed another person, Willie McCoy, during another controversial shooting.
Six times since 2011, an officer who has killed someone has killed again while still under investigation for the first shooting. In those six instances, the shortest investigation lasted 243 days. The longest? 1,470 days — more than four years.
Even if other officers involved in killings have refrained from killing again while under investigation, it has little to do with the department’s handling of these cases. On average, it takes the Vallejo PD 20 months to complete an investigation. In some cases, witnesses weren’t interviewed for months. In some cases, witnesses were never interviewed at all. All of this violates county policy, which states:
[D]epartment officials are responsible for “immediately” securing crime scenes, including identifying and sequestering witnesses in order to obtain their statements.
And this was not the only way foot-dragging occurred.
In 11 of the 17 cases, investigators did not meet a 30-day goal set by the county to complete their reports. Detectives often took even longer to request analysis on important evidence, such as bullets fired by officers, fingerprinting, DNA samples and weapons allegedly carried by the victims. In six investigations, Vallejo sent requests for evidence testing to a crime lab half a year or more following the killings. In most of those cases, the delayed analyses appear to have hampered the investigations or led to cases being closed by investigators before some forensic reports could be included.
Vallejo officers aren’t dumb. They know the department isn’t interested in investigating them. They know there will be no consequences for them if and when the investigations finally close. And the lack of accountability extends all the way to local prosecutors, who rely almost solely on the PD’s internal investigations and conclusions to make charging decisions.
The PD knows what it’s doing as well. Keeping investigations open means being able to deny public records requests or provide statements. The longer the investigation is open, the more likely it is that by the time it’s concluded, the public will have moved on to another outrage, even if it’s one perpetrated by a Vallejo PD officer.
Filed Under: california, police, police brutality, vallejo, vallejo pd
Minneapolis Pays $1.5 Million Settlement To Man Who Accidentally Shot At Cops During George Floyd Protests
from the you're-supposed-to-be-a-public-servant dept
Following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the streets of the city erupted in protest. Police responded accordingly. Which is to say indifferently. Rather than rein in the violence that had triggered the protests, many officers felt they needed to make protesters pay for their ungrateful response to racial bias and police violence.
One Minneapolis resident, Jaleel Stallings, found himself caught in the literal crossfire. A Minneapolis PD riot response team patrolled city streets in an unmarked van, hoping to catch rioters in the act or, at the very least, ring up a bunch of people on curfew violations. Stalling’s lawyer — representing him in his criminal case — was able to obtain body cam footage from officers manning the unmarked van that rolled up on his client.
The recordings show cops behaving at their worst, intent on punishing the public for daring to consider its policing efforts inadequate. Officers operating from the unmarked vehicle were firing indiscriminately at anyone caught out in the open, egged on by fellow officers and their direct supervisors.
Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! F*** ’em up, gas ’em, f*** ’em up.”
Bittell turned to his SWAT unit in the van and said, “Alright, we’re rolling down Lake Street. The first f***ers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s,” according to body camera footage described in court documents. He was referring to “less lethal” plastic projectiles sometimes called rubber bullets or 40mm launchers or rounds.
This indiscriminate act ended up costing Stallings his freedom. They opened fire on a nearby parking lot, hitting Stallings in the chest. Stallings, understandably (and accurately), believed he was under attack. The lawful gun owner returned fire with his pistol.
Shortly thereafter, Stallings realized he had been shooting at MPD officers. He then did what any responsible citizen would do: he tossed his gun out of his reach and dropped facedown on the ground to await the arrival of officers. In response for his efforts to atone for his mistake (a completely justifiable mistake, at that), Stallings was attacked by MPD officers who kicked and punched him for more than 30 seconds before arresting him on a long list of charges that included second-degree attempted murder. Stallings fought these charges while recovering from multiple injuries, including a fractured eye socket.
The officers lied about Stallings’ actions, claiming he “ran away” and raised a struggle while being handcuffed. The officers never stated — in their reports or statements to investigators — that they had beaten Stallings, even after he had been handcuffed. More contradictions would have followed but the officers were ordered to turn off their cameras nine minutes after the recordings began.
Stallings was acquitted of all charges following a jury trial. He then sued the officers for rights violations. Nearly two years after he was brutalized by thugs looking to inflict violence on people protesting police thuggery, Stallings is getting a payout from the city of Minneapolis.
The city of Minneapolis has agreed to pay $1.5 million plus costs and attorneys’ fees to Jaleel Stallings, an Army veteran who sued the city after being acquitted on the grounds of self-defense after he was charged with shooting at Minneapolis police who first fired marking rounds at him.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI are investigating the incident, which took place five days after the police murder of George Floyd.
The city is spending citizens’ money to make Stallings whole, but it’s unwilling to do without letting itself off the hook for causing the problem and buying its way out of it. Like far too many lawsuit settlements, this one allows the city and the PD to walk away from this without admitting they’ve done anything wrong.
The city will not admit guilt or take responsibility as part of the agreement with Stallings, which still has to be approved by the Minneapolis City Council.
What should be viewed as direct condemnation of the MPD’s actions that night will now be little more than a budget line item. It will be swept away by the passage of time like so many lawsuit settlements before it, allowing the MPD to pretend it’s not the home to several problematic officers, and the city to pretend it hasn’t utterly failed to engage in meaningful oversight of law enforcement agencies that are supposed to answer to it and are obligated to act as public servants.
Filed Under: jaleel stallings, minneapolis, minneapolis police, police brutality
Eleventh Circuit Strips Immunity From Deputy Who Saved A War Vet From Self-Harm By Breaking His Neck
from the only-response-to-possible-harm-is-more-harm,-apparently dept
One of the many symptoms of the many, deep-rooted, law enforcement sicknesses is how often officers decide to “help” people by harming them. That’s why some cities have chosen to redirect mental health issues to mental health professionals, rather than to armed officers who view anything they can’t immediately address with yelling and pointing of weapons as a threat that must be violently subdued.
Far too often, officers are summoned to help someone experiencing severe distress. And, far too often, officers do things like kill people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts or severely injure people who are threatening to injure themselves.
And, far too often, they’re able to walk away from the ensuing lawsuits because their creativity in “resolving” these issues falls outside of court precedent and clearly established law.
This isn’t one of those cases, fortunately. The Supreme Court may have conjured qualified immunity into existence and spent the following decades making it easier for law enforcement officers to evade the consequences of their actions, but the doctrine still somehow remains less than a forgone conclusion.
That’s the case here in a lawsuit that has made its way to Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court. This court says it’s unlawful to injure a compliant person for absolutely no fucking reason, especially when the stated intent of the interaction was to prevent someone from becoming more injured.
Iraq war veteran Kirby Ingram was having a terrible day. Thanks to the “intervention” of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department, it soon became much, much worse. From the decision [PDF]:
Ingram is an Iraq War veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. In October 2017, while suffering from a mental-health crisis, Ingram cut his wrist with a knife at his home. His girlfriend called the Veterans Affairs suicide hotline, which contacted law enforcement. Deputy Louis Kubik and another deputy from Madison County, Alabama, were dispatched to assist Ingram.
When the deputies arrived, Ingram was calm. The deputies searched him multiple times. They confiscated the knife with which Ingram had cut himself. After the search, the deputies knew that he was unarmed.
The deputies (and Ingram’s mother) tried to persuade him to let the deputies take him to the Department of Veteran Affairs. He refused. He asked if he was under arrest. The deputies assured him he wasn’t. Ingram again stated he would cooperate if they did wish to arrest him. They again stated they weren’t going to arrest him.
So, being free to go, Ingram went. He exited through the back door of the house and “ran into a cotton field.” The deputies pursued him. Eventually, Ingram stopped and the deputies again approached him. They said if he would go back to his house and affirmatively refuse medical treatment, they would leave. As the deputies and Ingram walked back to the house, Ingram again affirmed he would cooperate if the deputies decided to arrest him. And, again, the deputies assured Ingram they weren’t going to arrest him.
Then this happened:
When they reached the yard, “Ingram held his hands over his head and told [medical] personnel . . . that he was refusing medical treatment.” The deputies knew that Ingram was unarmed and posed no threat to them. “Without warning, Kubik then grabbed Ingram under his armpits, picked Ingram up, and slammed Ingram to the ground head first, causing Ingram to suffer a serious neck injury.” Ingram alleges that Kubik’s decision to body slam “Ingram was motivated by hostility toward Ingram due to Ingram’s mental illness.” Ingram was taken to the hospital. “A surgeon removed Ingram’s C-2 vertebra and replaced it with a metal rod. The surgeon also fused Ingram’s C-3 and C-4 vertebrae.”
The lower court didn’t exactly say this brutality was fine. It simply said it didn’t need to look too closely at the brutality because no similar brutality allegations were currently on file in the circuit.
After [Sheriff] Dorning, Kubik, and Turner moved to dismiss the claims against them, the district court granted their motions. The district court held that there was no unlawful seizure because Kubik had probable cause to seize Ingram. On the excessive-force claim, the district court held that Kubik was entitled to qualified immunity because Ingram “ha[d] not shown that his constitutional right was clearly established at the time of the seizure,” so there was “no need to decide if his constitutional right was violated.”
That’s the way the nation’s top court has set up qualified immunity examinations. So, that’s the way the lower court handled it. Fortunately, the Appeals Court is willing to actually examine the claims, rather than just defer to the hands-off approach encouraged by the Supreme Court.
While the court finds Deputy Kubik had probable cause to seize Ingram due to there being enough probable cause to support allegations that Ingram might continue injuring himself, this did not justify the injuries Kubik caused by deploying excessive force while carrying out this seizure.
Kubik argues that body slamming Ingram was justified because it “had the immediate effect of immobilizing him using nonlethal force and preventing any further threat from [Ingram], either to himself or to the officers.” Kubik also asserts that he “took advantage of an opportunity to physically detain [Ingram]—a former soldier experiencing a mental health crisis who had tried to commit suicide—after he had stopped running and the officers had caught up to him.” And Kubik maintains that he did not violate Ingram’s rights because of Ingram’s “aberrant and erratic conduct.” We disagree.
[…]
The deputies had searched Ingram and confiscated the knife with which he had cut himself, so they knew he was unarmed. Before Kubik body slammed him, Ingram had his hands over his head. And there was no sign that he sought to flee when he was seized. Accepting these allegations as true, Ingram “was not actively resisting arrest, and there is no [allegation] that he struggled with the police” at the time of the seizure. Although Kubik could lawfully seize Ingram, the “extent of the injury [he] inflicted” was significant enough to confirm the already tenuous nature of the relationship between the “need for application of force” and the “amount of force used.”
The court then goes on to cite several analogous cases the lower court apparently couldn’t Google when it performed its half-ass analysis of Deputy Kubik’s assault on an unresistant person whose only crime was attempting to harm themselves. After several paragraphs of quotes from applicable cases, the Appeals Court arrives at this conclusion.
Our precedents clearly established that Kubik could not use grossly disproportionate, gratuitous, and seriously injurious force against a non-resisting, compliant, and docile subject like Ingram. Ingram was unarmed. He posed no threat to Kubik. He had his hands over his head. And he reiterated that he would cooperate with any arrest. When Kubik body slammed Ingram headfirst without warning and caused a severe neck injury, that force was “utterly disproportionate to the level of force reasonably necessary” in that circumstance.
Not only is Kubik going to have to continue being sued, but his supervisor, (now former) Sheriff Blake Dorning has been stripped of immunity as well. Dorning may not have been present during this violation of rights, but Ingram submitted plenty of evidence showing the sheriff has repeatedly refused to investigate, much less punish, officers accused of excessive force or other misconduct. Since the record shows Dorning showed no interest in reining in excessive force deployment, this issue will also go in front of a jury. (And there’s plenty of evidence showing Dorning was a terrible sheriff that anyone with a search bar can easily access.)
Given what’s been shown so far in this case, it would make sense to settle. This would save the Sheriff from having to possibly admit in court he’s incapable or unwilling to control his officers. And it would allow the county and its sheriff’s department to spend taxpayers’ money to cover the cost of this wrongdoing. This solution obviously screws taxpayers, but maybe they’ll be a bit more careful who they pick to handle the job the next time a sheriff is up for election.
Filed Under: 11th circuit, blake dorning, kirby ingram, louis kubik, madison county, madison county sheriff's department, police brutality, qualified immunity