Four months after an officer was caught on video threatening a citizen/photographer — then smacking the camera out of his hand — police officials still haven’t identified the cop or taken action. But they may have located a written report about the beating that was videotaped.
The incident took place last Sept. 10 in a parking lot in the rowdy Crown Street bar district.
After the Independent reported on it on Oct. 8, the department said it would launch an internal investigation into the incident. Few details have emerged since then.
Click on the play arrow above to watch the video of the incident taken by a passerby named James Kelly. It was one of three high-profile incidents in the district last fall in which cops allegedly arrested or threatened to arrest citizens for using cameras; Police Chief Frank Limon said he’s about to unveil a new policy aimed at insuring that doesn’t happen anymore.
This past week the department produced a police report of an incident that took place Sept. 10 at roughly the same time on the same block as the event captured on the video. The report makes no mention of the threats and action taken against the citizen taking the video. But it does describe use of force against an allegedly rowdy 19-year-old man.
Capt. Bryan Kearney, co-leader of the department’s patrol division, said he can’t confirm that this is the same incident. He looked through reports from that evening’s shift and came up with this one as perhaps the best potential match. He forwarded the report to the department’s internal affairs division last Thursday. Kearney and Chief Frank Limon said internal affairs will now try to figure out which cops were involved and what happened.
“We can’t say for certain it was that incident,” Kearney said. “You have to be very, very careful with that. That’s why we shipped it over to internal affairs.”
The department released a redacted version of the report to the Independent. It offers a starkly different account of the event from one given to the Independent by passerby Kelly in a previous interview.
Use Of Force
Officer Ann Mays wrote the report.
She wrote that she and Officer Yelena Borisova were patrolling the district at 10:44 a.m. when they “saw a large group outside … Crown St. Bar and Grille who were fighting with one another.”
She noted in the report that “between the hours of 0045 hours and 0100 hours or ‘bar closing’ the streets are filled with thousands of patrons pouring out of the bars and clubs in that area, most of which have been consuming copious amounts of alcohol … The downtown area has a history of incidents during these times ranging from fights, assaults on police officers, and robberies, all the way to sexual assaults and murders.”
In this case the officers found a 19-year-old man “being held back by several other males, and was fighting his way out of their grasp in order to continue a feud with another patron,” Mays wrote.
“I grabbed him with the help of fellow officers in an attempt to stop him from fighting. In turn he kept resisting our commands and tried to fight us. He was eventually brought to the ground and rolled on his stomach, however he refused to place his hands behind his back for us to handcuff him. He kept twitching his legs and rolling on top of his arms. At this point I delivered 3 baton strikes to his upper right thigh. Ofc. McKay” then placed something (the word is blacked out in the released report) on the suspect.
The suspect “sustained a small laceration to his chin during the struggle but declined medical attention,” Mays wrote.
“He was placed into the back of a patrol cruiser where he kept swearing and kicking at the door. … His attitude was extremely foul and resistant.”
The man was charged with breach of peace.
The Independent hasn’t been able to locate the man.
Kelly, the 22-year-old from Hamden who made the video, offered a different version in a conversation last fall.
Kelly had gone downtown with some friends from Southern Connecticut State University that evening. Just before 1 a.m., he and his friends stepped out of Stella Blues. He noticed a young guy of maybe 19 or 20 crossing the street. All of a sudden, a cop ran up behind him and grabbed the guy and threw him to the ground. From what Kelly could see, it was entirely unprovoked.
“He wasn’t running or anything,” Kelly said. “They just started beating on him, like, bad.”
“He wasn’t resisting or anything. He went right down,” Kelly said. The police were using Tasers on the guy, who was shouting “What did I do?” Kelly recalled. He said he and his friends were all shocked by the police behavior.
Kelly had just gotten a new phone with a good camera and his friends encouraged him to start filming. He fired up his phone. A police officer immediately told Kelly he could join the guy on the ground. Kelly interpreted that as a threat to his physical safety.
Then another cop forced him to stop filming by grabbing his camera and shutting it off. The police then started pushing bystanders away from the site of the arrest.
Kelly said the cops put their arrestee in a cruiser and took him away. “This kid was a mess. He was bleeding. He was all shaken up,” Kelly said. As for the police, “They just walked away like nothing even happened.”
“I’m just enraged by the whole thing,” Kelly said. “I just felt so bad for that kid.” He said he was upset by the way the cops were treating the guy they arrested. He said he also feels like his rights were violated by police forcing him to stop filming.
The police department has so far not learned which cops were at the scene, according to Capt. Kearney. He was asked if anyone had approached Officer Mays, who wrote the report. No one has, he said; she’s currently out on sick leave. No other officers have been interviewed, either, he said.
Some in the department suggest that at least some of the officers in the video might be state cops, not city cops, but that’s apparently based on viewing the grainy video, not on interviews with those present.
When the video surfaced last fall, city officials at first suggested it might not have taken place in New Haven at all. The Independent then presented an enlarged detail of a still from the video and matched it to a daytime photo of the same lot; at that point officials stopped raising that question and promised an investigation would ensue.
The Video Attack
The newly released police report from that evening sheds no light on why the officer threatened Kelly and took action against him. On the video, a male officer can be heard speaking to Kelly while engaged in attacking the suspect with some three other officers.
“You’re welcome to join him,” he tells Kelly.
Kelly indicated he wasn’t interested in having the police beat him up, too.
The male cop then approaches Kelly and grabs the camera out of his hand. Kelly asks why he did that.
“You don’t take pictures of us,” the cop responds. “How’s that? How do you shut this off?”
Kelly shows him how. End of video. End of story?
The force should think twice about having their upcoming no-confidence vote on the chief. Looks a heck of a lot like a smokescreen for the kind of behavior described in this report.