These sort of stories—a deaf man allegedly Tased, beaten, and arrested by Hawthorne, California officers who mistook his attempt at sign language as a physical threat—generate the usual outrage over excess use of force. But there’s one detail consistent with nearly every excessive force incident that doesn’t seem to generate the outrage it should:
In February, Meister had been loading boxes of winter clothes and a snowboard that belonged to him at a friend’s house when a neighbor mistook him for a robber and called police. When officers Jeffrey Salmon, Jeffrey Tysl, Erica Bristow, and Mark Hultgren arrived on the scene, they encountered Meister and ordered him to stop. The only problem is that Meister is deaf and couldn’t hear the officers so he couldn’t obey their commands.
After grabbing his hand, a startled Meister began communicating the only way he can- by using sign language. As he desperately tried to make them understand him, the cops decided that Meister was trying to resist and assault them. So they jumped him, took him to ground, shot him twice with a Taser and punched and kicked the crap of him until they finally arrested him and charged him with assault.
This automatic charge of assaulting an officer and/or resisting arrest nearly every time officers assault a suspect is one of the more pernicious practices of modern policing. I understand that police use it to justify their actions, and that it gives prosecutors and city attorneys leverage in negotiating plea deals or in persuading victims to drop lawsuits (“We’ll drop our charges if you drop yours”).
But the officers are lying.
It is one thing to be so fucking stupid as to beat and arrest a deaf man for not adequately responding to verbal commands. But by the time those charges were formally filed, everybody involved had to be totally aware of what had actually transpired. And yet they filed the assault charges anyway.
If I were to knowingly file a false report with the police, it would be a crime. Officers who file false reports to cover their tracks should be held criminally liable too.
Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve seen this happen close up. It needs to be on the police reform table both in Seattle and nationally. Actually, it is really a city government reform, since mayors, council members, and city attorneys are really the culpable parties.
Reminds me of the case where a gaggle of TSA airport security screeners assumed an 86-year-old traveler’s Congressional Medal of Honor was some sort of martial arts weapon.
Okay, so they arrested, cuffed, tased, and beat a guy for being deaf. There goes a couple million dollars of taxpayer money out the window. Criminal charges are a pipe dream, but at least, these stupid cops should be fired. This case perfectly illustrates why no one respects the police anymore. These morons make every cop in America look stupid and venal.
Folks, when ordinary law-abiding citizens are more afraid of the police than criminals, it should be obvious we have a serious problem. When entire police departments need sacking, it’s equally obvious the wrong people are being hired for police work. The problem is, can we do anything about it? Or are we stuck with it, just like we’re stuck with GOP gerrymandering and vote suppression and a worthless Congress?
Police Officers are specifically screened for sadistic tendencies and low intelligence. Police Departments in every jurisdiction in the country train their new officers on materials provided by private “security” companies that are the same companies that own private prisons, sutlers and furnish private security to the wealthy and the corporations.
The same people that own private corporate prisons are training Police Officers in every jurisdiction in the country. they publish the materials used for instruction, they contract for operation of Police Academies, and they train the new officers to react to facial expressions in a confrontation. If you show fear, that is the justification for an attack.
It is so rare for a Police Officer to be prosecuted for a crime that nearly every incidence of it makes national news, and it only occurres if the crime is one that an average citizen can recognize as such, like dealing drugs. Convictions are almost non-existent.
As an Officer of the Law, rape is legal, murder is legal, violent assault is legal, burglary is legal, armed robbery on the highways is legal. There was a California Highway patrol Officer that was raping women that he was pulling over. He would specifically target pretty young women, pull them over and then direct them to a secluded spot where he would rape them at gunpoint. There were dozens of complaints made, and several of the women were subsequently targeted for investigation for various crimes by other departments. This officer was a known rapist amongst his fellow officer and his superiors. When someone would start making too much noise about the issue, the Officer was transferred to another department. He was allowed to continue his activities for nearly two decades before he was finally caught. It only became an issue when the problem became public. Until that point, the Department had no real concern for the Officer’s activities.
The Chief of Police in Tacoma murdered his wife in broad daylight in front of their children. He was a long term abuser, and was able to use the department to harass his wife, using officers to follow her around and report to him what she was doing during the day. When she finally reported him and filed for divorce, the department went into full offense mode, pulling her over several times a week and searching her vehicle, investigating her for child abuse, reporting her to the school system and DSHS in connection with that, investigating her for petty thefts and literally sitting in their cars outside of her home and confronting her when she tried to leave the house. The Officers were making every attempt to create an image of her being a thief, child abuser and junkie. In the end, her former husband, a highly decorated and “respected” officer of the law, shot her six times in the head, then himself with his service weapon while their kids watched.
If one is a Cop, nothing is illegal until it becomes public knowledge.
Well, if we made the police officers who offend personally financially responsible for the inevitable lawsuits that arise as a result of police misconduct, there would be a lot less abusive police behavior. After all, if a member of the police department loses his or her house to a lawsuit, there is a strong incentive for other poilce members to not to do such things.
The thing is, police work is NOT more dangerous than in the past, so you can’t justify police violence on those grounds. In fact, police work has become much safer:
“The go-to phrase deployed by police officers, district attorneys and other law enforcement-related entities to justify the use of excessive force … is ‘the officer(s) feared for his/her safety.’ …
But … [t]he annual report from the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund … found that deaths in the line of duty … were the fewest since 1959. … The number of firearms deaths [of police officers] … was the lowest since 1887.
This statistical evidence suggests being a cop is safer than its been since the days of Sheriff Andy Griffith.”
Conversely, statistics also show far more civilians are killed by police than police are killed by civilians — by a factor of several times. In other words, cops are winning the body count contest by lopsided margins.
Now let’s play a quiz game: Who are the most violent people in society? If you said criminals, you’d be wrong:
“Look at Seattle … 20% of its 2013 homicides were committed by police officers — 6 out of 29 total. … One homicide per 300 officers versus one homicide per 22,000 residents … the disparity here is enormous.”
Ouch. That strikes close to home. So how, exactly, did our high police-homicide rate come about? Roughly, like this:
“Efforts have been made … to make things safer for police officers. The ubiquitous use of bulletproof vests has contributed to this decrease in firearms-related deaths, as has a variety of policies aimed at reducing high-speed chases. But very little effort has been made to decrease the number of people killed by law enforcement. (Notably, Seattle’s police chief attributes the high homicide numbers to not ‘effectively managing’ interactions with people with mental health issues.) Some deaths are nearly impossible to prevent, but there are others where the situation has been allowed to deteriorate far too quickly or a shoot-first mentality has prevailed. The escalating adoption of military equipment and tactics has also contributed to the steady ‘justifiable homicide’ count.”
Bottom line,
“[T]he narrative push by officers to present their job as persistently deadly doesn’t jibe with the death totals. The First Rule of Policing (‘get home safe’) is a crutch for bad cops. Cops are getting home safe now more than ever. It’s those on the other side of the blue line that haven’t seen their chances improve.”
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131230/15411225716/number-officers-killed-line-duty-drops-to-50-year-low-while-number-citizens-killed-cops-remains-unchanged.shtml
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Yes, we should all want our cops to “get home safe.” And we should support their legitimate crime-fighting efforts. But we don’t want them shooting kids with toy guns, people sitting in their own homes with TV remote controls, or gunning down unarmed teenagers for giving lip. It’s out of control, and it needs to be brought under control, and that has to start with more accountability, which necessarily means ending the practice of giving cops unlimited and unqualified immunity from doing a hideously bad job of policing our streets.
@5 The rapist cop you describe wasn’t a single incident. There have been multiple cases in numerous jurisdictions.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/w.....trend.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: When you’re raped by a cop, who do you call? The police?
You guys are spending too much time on this, don’t you know gays want to get married and play football?
Only the cops should be allowed to have guns.
As NWA said “fuck the police!”
@9 You can’t play football if you’re dead because you disputed a jaywalking ticket with a racist cop.
Apparently brutalizing the public is SOP for Hawthorne’s cops:
“The Hawthorne, CA Police Department has a history of assaultive behavior toward the public. … In one incident, Hawthorne officers Tasered an autistic child, then when his parents complained, they returned and arrested him a week later. Last year, the same Hawthorne Police arrested a man for videotaping them in a public space, then shot his dog when it ran to his side.”
I’ll come back to the autistic child and dog-shooting cases in a minute, but first, here are some details about the police assault against the deaf man …
“When Meister saw the officers, he sat his boxes down and walked toward them, trying to use American Sign Language to let them know he is deaf. The officers did not respond to his gestures, but grabbed his wrist and spun him around so his back was to them. … One of the officers then grabbed Meister by the hand, who responded by attempting to use American Sign Language to communicate with the officer. The officers interpreted his sudden movements as resistance, so they … forcibly took him to the ground … [and] continued to beat Meister until he was unconscious. They charged him with assaulting an officer ….”
http://jonathanturley.org/2014.....ciousness/
Now for the autistic child case:
“The Hawthorne City Council is considering a $300,000 settlement in a case were its police tasered an autistic teenager and then, after the family filed a complaint with the department, returned a week later and arrested the teenager.”
Other news stories indicate the boy, who was 12 at the time, but big for his age, fought with a school counselor and security guard, and then kicked the cop in the groin, before being tasered; but the arrest looks like retaliation for the parents’ complaint.
Now the dog shooting case. Yes, THAT case, the now-world-famous police-shooting-dog video that has garnered nearly 6 million views on You Tube.
The dog’s owner was a black guy who claims Hawthorne police have “a pattern of harassing conduct.” He got out of his car to take video of police responding to an armed robbery call. The cops objected to loud music emanating from his car. They also didn’t like his video recording activity. When he argued with them, they got rough with him and then handcuffed him, and his dog jumped out of the open car window to protect his master, at which point a cop executed the dog.
http://newsone.com/2890534/leo.....l-his-dog/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The Hawthorne police are being sued in all three of these cases. Taxpayers will pay, the cops won’t be disciplined, and things will go on as they always have. Same shit, different day.
Another Dubious Cop Shooting
Last Wednesday morning, police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, shot and killed a 22-year-old black man who allegedly was brandishing what his family says was a fake samurai sword.
The police wouldn’t necessarily know that, or what the subject’s intent was, and the shooting may have been justified if he rushed toward them with the sword as they contend.
Problem is, an independent autopsy has determined the subject was shot in the back multiple times, and witnesses say he was running away from the police when he was shot.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/15/.....?hpt=hp_t2
10, see comment #14.