NHPD
Officer Santiago punches Luis Rivera during arrest.
Was now-fired Officer Jason Santiago’s punch to the face of a handcuffed, intoxicated man who spat at him an appropriate response to a potentially dangerous attack?
Or was it instead the violent culmination of an officer’s failure to deescalate a volatile situation?
New Haven officials have offered contradictory answers to the force and to the public.
The answers have come in the course of an investigation and disciplinary proceeding that led to a Board of Police Commissioners vote Tuesday night to fire Santiago.
The internal affairs report about the Dec. 25, 2019 incident in question cites a department expert stating that Santiago erred in kicking a handcuffed drunken man and pulling him up by his braids — but he acted reasonably and appropriately by then slugging him in the face. Because the man had spit at him. The Elicker Administraiton’s labor relations director offered the same take in a presentation before the police commissioners.
Yet the police chief who recommended Santiago’s dismissal and the mayor publicly stated that the attacks were all of one piece, and unacceptable in New Haven. As did a leading Connecticut criminal-justice expert.
The mixed message comes at a time when protests nationwide and in New Haven have led to a public reexamination of what kind of force society will accept from police officers.
“One of the things we pride ourselves in is our ability to deescalate situations,” Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said during a recent press conference about Santiago’s actions. “Obviously, we have work to do.”
The official account of Santiago’s actions came Tuesday night during the Board of Police Commissioners’s virtual meeting. That meeting ultimately resulted in Santiago being fired.
City Director of Labor Relations Cathleen Simpson and police union attorney Marshall Segar both argued that Santiago acted appropriately when he punched an intoxicated, handcuffed man named Luis Rivera in the face during an arrest on Lombard Street last Christmas.
The legal adversaries — one of whom was arguing for Santiago’s firing, the other of whom was defending the officer’s job — leaned heavily on an Internal Affairs report that came to the same conclusion after its authors interviewed local use of force expert Officer David Acosta.
According to that report, Acosta cleared Santiago’s punch as reasonable because saliva can contain infectious diseases, and Santiago’s punch “stopped Rivera from spitting further on officers.”
Acosta found that Santiago used excessive force not when he punched the spitting, handcuffed man, but rather when he kicked that same man in the groin and pulled him up by his braids earlier in the incident.
The police commissioners ultimately voted 4 – 2 Tuesday in support of firing Santiago for violating the department’s use of force and de-escalation policies, as well as its general rules of conduct.
Call It A “Hand Strike”
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Simpson (pictured) and Segar made clear to the commissioners that the excessive force under consideration was not the punch, but instead just the kick and the hair-pulling.
Before the vote took place, Commissioner Evelise Ribeiro asked Simpson to clarify. So the allegation of the kick and the pulling of the braids constitute the violations of force? she asked. “Not necessarily the punch?”
That’s right, Simpson replied. “It was more of a hand strike,” she said about the punch. “That reaction with the striking was not considered a violation of the use of force policy.”
Segar (pictured) offered his full support for that interpretation. The punch was not a violation, as determined by the police investigators and use of force expert Acosta, he said. “I don’t think that that’s disputed.”
Santiago also justified his punch Tuesday night by pointing to saliva’s potential to carry infectious diseases. “I find this to be one of the most degrading and disrespectful things a person can do to another, especially a police officer,” he said about Rivera spitting at him.
Segar said Wednesday that Santiago and the police union plan to contest the officer’s firing, as reported by the New Haven Register’s Ben Lambert.
“He Escalated The Situation”
After the police commission’s vote in support of firing Santiago, Reyes (pictured) told the Independent he disagreed with the city labor director’s framing of what constituted excessive force and what constituted reasonable force during the incident in question.
He said Rivera’s spitting and Santiago’s punch have to be understood in the broader context of Santiago’s “overall behavior.”
“He escalated the situation,” Reyes said about the now-fired officer. “He created the volatile situation.”
Santiago kicking Rivera in the groin.
So while it’s not OK for the arrestee to spit, the spitting was in response to an escalation by the officer, who kicked Rivera in the groin and pulled him by his braids. The spitting in the face and subsequent punch to the face then became a further escalation of a situation Santiago had caused.
Reyes said something similar during a recent press conference outside 1 Union Ave. “What I would have liked to have seen in that incident is a situation where officers deescalated that it didn’t turn into what it was,” he said. “Do we have room for improvement? You’ll be the judge when you see that video. But from my vantage point, there is a lot to learn from that.”
Mayor Justin Elicker, who voted Tuesday night in support of firing Santiago, offered a similar concern.
He said the punch to the face may have been legal, “but it was still deeply inappropriate conduct that could have been avoided.”
Instead, Santiago escalated the situation to the point where Rivera spit in the officer’s face because the officer had previously kicked Rivera in the groin and pulled his hair, the mayor said.
In an email press release sent out after the commission voted, Elicker singled out the punch as uniquely worthy of condemnation.
“Officer Santiago’s actions, punching an individual while the individual was in handcuffs, is clearly an action that goes well beyond what is appropriate conduct,” he is quoted as saying in the press release. “This type of behavior is not acceptable and should have significant consequences.”
In Custody, Still Resisting
Markeshia Ricks file photo
Mike Lawlor (pictured) — a former co-chair of the state legislature’s Judiciary Committee, a former state undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, and an associate professor who teaches about criminal justice at the University of New Haven — said that, from a policy perspective, this incident raises questions for him about deescalation and officer training.
“You’re only allowed to use extra force in order to protect yourself,” he said. “You’re not allowed to use it to get even with someone who did something bad to you.”
Indeed, the department’s use of force policy states that “officers shall use only the amount of force necessary and reasonable to control a situation, effect an arrest, overcome resistance to arrest, or defend themselves or others from harm. When force is necessary, the degree of force employed should be a direct relationship to the amount of resistance exerted, or the immediate threat to the officers or others.”
“Once you have somebody handcuffed,” as Rivera was at the time of the kick, the hair pulling, the spitting, and the punch, “the ability to hurt you is pretty minimal,” Lawlor said.
He said the local police brutality incident gets at a larger question about what officers should do when they have a person in custody and that person is continuing to resist.
“Is it a situation where you just want to step back and let a guy get it out of his system?” he asked. Lawlor said that, based on his experience and studies, more experienced officers tend to do just that, thereby deescalating the situation.
When an arrestee is already restrained, he said, there’s very little he can actually do to hurt those around him — even if he is being insulting, as Rivera clearly was.
“In the same way that medical professionals need to be dispassionate in the operating room regardless of how insulting their patient becomes, it’s the same concept for officers,” he said.
In this case, Santiago responded to a handcuffed Rivera’s resistance by escalating the situation: kicking him in the groin, pulling him by the hair, and punching him in the face in response to being spat at.
The NHPD’s deescalation policy states, “Force shall be de-escalated immediately as resistance decreases.”
“We put so many responsibilities on front-line police officers,” Lawlor pointed out. “They’re overwhelmed.”
He said they have to deal with everything from mental illness to substance abuse to forensic sciences to victims’ rights. That’s a wide range of issues for one worker to be expected to handle.
Indeed, in this very case, Santiago and his colleagues were responding to a call about an intoxicated man and a relatively routine motor vehicle accident.
Lawlor said he thinks that all-encompassing nature of police work as it currently exists is one of the catalysts for the current nationwide rethinking of what role police officers can and should play in promoting public safety.
Lawlor noted that San Francisco’s mayor recently announced that police officers will no longer respond to noncriminal calls involving mental health, the homeless, school discipline, and disputes between neighbors.
And Albuquerque’s mayor has said that he wants to create a new city department other than the police department that is focused on community safety.
The incident between Santiago and Rivera started out as a call about an intoxicated person and a motor vehicle accident, Lawlor noted. He said that nationwide trends around police reform seem to be pointing towards a future where police officers will not be the ones called on to respond to such incidents.
I suspect this whole charade will end up costing us taxpayers a lot... The city better have a straight story as to what he was actually fired for when this gets to court.