What Happened On Sept. 10 (Maybe)

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by Paul Bass and Thomas MacMillan | Jan 20, 2011 11:24 am

(11) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Legal Writes

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?

Comments

posted by: robn on January 20, 2011 11:34am

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.

posted by: Ellis Copeland on January 20, 2011 11:43am

It is common when one deals with a pack of children to punish the whole pack when no one will accept responsibility for bad behavior. In this case the best course of action would be for Chief Limon to fire EVERY cop and start over. And for you cops who will screech about how righteous you are an how tough your job is: break the blue line and tell what you know. Otherwise the next time no one in the community trusts you or refuses to give you information—....

posted by: streever on January 20, 2011 11:53am

Our PD is a mess.

It is bizarre and kind of sad that they can’t even figure out which officers may have been in that area that night.

A man was arrested, put in a car, and there is no real record?

How can that be?

posted by: Paul Martin on January 20, 2011 12:13pm

If members of the union are going to argue that the crime rate isn’t their problem, how can we expect them to do things like paperwork?

We make them work until 52 and force them to retire at pensions of $125,000 a year. Under those harsh conditions it’s no wonder they resent us.

posted by: HewNaven?? on January 20, 2011 1:21pm

One thing is for sure: video documentation makes these incidents not go away in the public consciousness. But, that still doesn’t mean Internal Affairs won’t bury this in an official sense. Once they get done with the case, it will be like it never happened.

posted by: Objective Perspective on January 20, 2011 2:50pm

Kelly’s account of what happened is completely inconsistent with what I see in the video. The man being arrested is CLEARLY resisting!!! I watched the video several times and I see a man on the ground trying to get up and refusing to put his hands behind his back.

Was the level of force used excessive? Maybe, maybe not, that is debatable. What is NOT debatable is that this man was lying on the ground submitting and being beaten for no reason at all.

As far as the cop threatening Kelly and making him turn off his camera, that is just wrong. The department should be able to figure out who he is and discipline him for sure.

Well that’s my 2 cents. I thought it was necessary to shed some objective light on this situation since most of the people commenting seem to be stuck to one extreme or the other.

posted by: Edgehood on January 20, 2011 2:59pm

Police departments are among a long list of old style institutions that have make adjustments for the 21st century. Once the police accept the fact that the public has a right to take video of them at work, I’m sure that they will make adjustments and everything will be fine. I just wonder how many ‘test cases’ we will have to go through before the message gets finally gets across to the police ‘rank and file’ that they can get in trouble for harassing people who tape them ‘on the job’.

posted by: anon on January 20, 2011 3:46pm

Since almost none of the cops actually live in New Haven, the public has very little real control over any of this. The officers don’t care about what happens here since it doesn’t impact their corner of the world in Wallingford or West Haven.

One of the top ranking cops even has a “Screw Obama” sticker on their car - shows what he/she thinks about our city and how sensitive he/she is to the people who live in it.

It is time to institute a strict residency requirement, or at the very least, a drastic cut in salaries and benefits combined with major housing incentives for cops who do choose to live within the city. The potential loss of talent would be more than offset by lower crime rates that result from having officers actually live within city limits.

What would a public “no confidence vote” in the police union, and their decisions, involve?

posted by: Paul Martin on January 20, 2011 7:00pm

You know, anon, that’s a really good case for a residency requirement.

While I don’t think it’s the greatest idea overall, for emergency responders it’s pretty standard in most cities. And for the police especially, this could be a way to a few troublemakers to stop acting like an occupying army.

posted by: Anon on January 20, 2011 8:17pm

The editorializing in the police report is lol funny…but not so much. Shows how much these cops try to cover their .... After they beat you good and soft.

posted by: streever on January 22, 2011 12:41am

I’m skeptical of the police.

I was once choked badly enough to leave bruises, straddled, and slammed into the street by a cop.

Guess what I was charged with?

Nothing.

When witnesses were present, he said, “Mr Streever! You were very upset. I was just trying to restrain you—for your own safety—you didn’t do anything wrong. That car tried to run you over. I wanted to just give them a ticket, but you got upset, and I had to restrain you to keep you safe.”

Internal Affairs skipped meetings with me, threatened me with charges for “Trespassing” when I entered their office for one of the SCHEDULED meetings (our 3rd), and said I’d go to jail on felony charges because I touched the officers shoulder and said, “Excuse me”, when he had called me an “ahole” and stuck his hand in my face.

I have met some of the most repellent, angry, battle-scarred individuals in my entire life on the police force.

I’ve also met some really great cops.

However, the way that IA & the Chief (Ortiz at the time, Limon now) covers up the parasitic low-lifes who abuse innocent civilians is sickening.

These are the people who protect us? Who take care of us? It makes me laugh.

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