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Nov 27, 2012 at 2:01 pm
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Rule #1; if the cops go to cuff you, let them. You will always lose otherwise.
[/idiocy]
#1, the cops didn't know who they were arresting. So much for the "he had a rap sheet as long as my arm" talk, that's just a convenient excuse established after the fact.
#2, where's the probable cause to initiate the arrest? Etherly's refusal to give his name is not a crime, since this was an investigative stop, not a traffic stop.
The third character to enter the frame there (the primary protagonist) pretty clearly has no business being armed and wearing a badge.
It shows to me that their professionalism needs some work.
The third officer to the scene should be let go. He obviously cant handle authority the public trusts him with.
Also he choked him with an open cuff?? That could be construed to be deadly force, sloppy to say the least..
In the seconds leading up to the punch, officer #3
- briefly choked Everly (you can clearly see the hand around the throat) and
- had his hand pushing down on Everly's face, covering his mouth and nose.
To me it looks like he couldn't breathe. I don't know if you've ever been around a person whose airways are being constricted, but some spittle when they do get some air is not unusual or questionable.
http://youtu.be/uj0mtxXEGE8
Conclusion: the SPD are not an entity to be reasoned with. They have no self-awareness and either are refusing to or are incapable of understanding that their actions are unacceptable and to account for them. It may be impractical to dismantle the organization entirely and build from the ground up, but that is where the discussion needs to start.
Also, zero probable cause.
It looks like a case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes but I think we all expect better from our police department.
3rd cop is wrong, fire him.
pay suspect X dollars for being blinded.
move on to next misuse of force by SPD. . .
SPD walk up to a guy standing at a bus stop and ask if he just got out of a van. The guy says he didn't. They ask him his name. He doesn't give it. They arrest him.
Is that really all it takes to get arrested in this town?
They have that option. We don't. We're serfs.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Give him $50 credit towards his next court case, which judging by his rap sheet won't be long from now.
But this? I can't believe some of the comments I am reading. This is despicable. This is a guy who was questioned for a hit and run (a charge that was eventually DISMISSED AT ARRAIGNMENT, which means it was paper thin), and the cops escalated this into an arrest and an assault.
I am stunned that this is happening in the shadow of the DOJ investigation. And stunned that anyone would think this was okay or justified.
"Career criminal" ? -- the cops didn't even know who he was
"Drives a white van" ? -- the cops didn't even know whether he had gotten out of that white van
Must be nice for you guys to discover these things after making a violent arrest. But you can't turn around and say that they somehow justified the arrest when they weren't known to the cops on the scene at the time.
(That whole "the law no hindsight bias" thing? it cuts both ways.)
Overall not too bad, but definitely unprofessional. This situation could have easily been deescalated if one of the cops decided to not treat him like a fucking animal. But they kept ratcheting it up until they got what they wanted.
These fucking morons need to be taught how to deal with people.
Everything after that just compounds it. None of those cops should ever work again.
Why is that so hard to grasp for you? The SPD is incompetent, from hiring to training to execution to leadership. They've actually proved this! By the fucking FEDS! Yes, yes, they couched it in nice language, so those poor cops widdle fee-fees don't get hurt, but that's what it basically amounts to.
They didn't kill the guy then burn his car down by the levee did they? what is the problem, all y'all?
From what I saw in the video, there was no probable cause to arrest the suspect. Once the determination was made to arrest him, and they instructed him to put his hands behind his back, I'm not sure that the opportunity was given to the suspect to comply, and their force at that point became excessive in my mind. He may not have been agreeable up until that point, but he did seem to be reluctantly compliant with their instructions.
I would prefer not to continue paying the salary of the 3rd cop to arrive on the scene, his punch in the face to the suspect was far more than he needed to do to apprehend the suspect, who again, should not have been arrested based upon what we know.
The other two should be reprimanded.
The suspect should be compensated for his injuries, and civil actions against the 3rd officer should be entertained by the suspect.
All that being said, this is hardly of the level that we have seen before here in Seattle and beyond. Perhaps we are becoming softened to the "police brutality videos", and what would have been outlandish 10 or 20 years ago is now "routine" to us. Cops have tough jobs. I have good friends that are cops, and recognize that the vast majority of them are good people and citizens. They do their jobs well, and they don't overreact like officer 3 in the video.
The real question to me, though, is why was the SPD so reluctant to release this? They allowed a situation to fester, and it turned into something much more explosive and public than it would likely have been if they had just released it (or allowed Egan to).
Didn't watch the beginning, won't comment on cause to arrest.
1) Lack of probable cause is not grounds to resist arrest. I am not sure the video really tells us one way or the other on that as we don't know what other information the cops had.
2) He pretty clearly resisted and spit at the cop. They had grounds to be forceful with him over that. Initially the cops were simply restraining him to cuff him and he was fighting them.
3) There was zero reason to punch the guy. The cop got made and hit the guy. Kind of understandable when you've just been spit on, but a cop should be able to control himself and if he can't then he should not be a cop.
The officers in this video, and many others, and the SPOG have no interest in serving the public, but only the self serving interests of their group. This is sport to them. They find their little justification and rationalization, enough to sow doubt in the press, and there you have it.
The police are supposed to be the professionals, are supposed to de-escalate, not let a situation get so far out of control to the point where the citizen's injury (or death) is inevitable, while they hide behind a neato labor relations clause in their contract that the city doesn't have the balls to change.
They are one of the highest paid forces in the country, yet they behave like two-bit redneck suburban rent a cops. Pathetic.
What exactly did the guy do that requires there to be "ramifications?"
The guy is walking through a parking lot (2:04), goes to talk to some people at a bus stop, the cops come up and he follows them to their car (2:26) lets Cop #1 frisk him, and he answers their questions relevant to their investigation ("I didn't get out of no white van."). He stood "in the position" for about a minute / minute and a half, putting his hand back down on the hood when Cop #1 asks him to, then moves to go sit on the bumper once they stop talking to him (4:03). Cop #2 grabs his wrist (off camera 4:10) and he shakes it off saying what sounds like "I didn't do anything, alright?". They ask him to sit on the bumper and he does. So Cop #3 runs up at 4:17, he give Cop #3 lip ("What are you gonna do, knock me out?") and Cop #3 asks his name, he declines and says, "What's your name?" (4:26).
Now how exactly is this "running about doing what ever the hell he likes?"
For the sake of this exercise, please consider the police had cause to detain the suspect. Also please consider the suspect successfully spit into the arresting officer's face.
I am willing to assume the police had cause to believe this suspect was somehow associated with a vehicle seen leaving the scene of a crime.
I'm sure Leo Etherly said that during his arrest and jail time for assault…. and the time he was arrested for domestic violence….and the arrest for lewd behavior. He probably said it in all of his 14 court appearances in 3 counties in the past two years as well.
Chris Rock has a pretty easy to understand video on how not to get smacked around by the police:
tinyurl.com/bpokbu4
That said this video is also not going to be seen as the horrific demonstration of abuse it was hyped to be. And why most people in the thread are mostly shrugging it off.
I strongly disagree with shrugging off ANY police abuse, but this is the problem with Goldy and Cienna and The Stranger over-hyping the shit out of this video BEFORE anybody saw it. (Stranger you guys need to treat this shit more seriously and stop acting like local TV news and more like journalists. WWED. Ask "What Would Eli Do?")
You can see immediately with the demeanor of the other cops (and the offending officer) that they all knew there was an over-reaction. Which I suppose bodes well. Because there was a time Seattle cops would just beat the living shit out of you — no EMT's or patrol supervisor would be fourth coming to the scene and any video would just magically disappear. So I suppose maybe the cops at least recognize when they fuck up now.
04:29
The suspect clearly pulled his arm back and had his fist clenched to punch.
Whatever follows after that is justified for subduing a person about to attack an officer.
Case closed.
@58 / 59 I am always game for some armchair policing. :) So!
I'll stipulate that the officers did have reasonable suspicion to detain Etherly. (I'm not sure what the basis of their suspicion was, but let's run with it.)
#1 thing they should have done differently is spend more time gathering information, instead of leaping to the decision to arrest Etherly with no apparent probable cause.
Yes, I will grant that it's possible there were additional facts not shown on video or otherwise reported yet which supported the arrest decision. But it's hard to get away from the fact that when Etherly says, "Don't worry about my name -- what's your name?", that's the moment when Faust responds, "Turn around and put your hands behind your back."
If the arrest was illegal, as I suspect it was, then they should have done everything differently in terms of how they handled Etherly from there on out. But for the sake of discussion, we'll assume they had PC. So...
#2 thing they should have done differently is not resorted instantly to the force tactic of placing both hands on Etherly's neck. (I'm referring to how, the moment Etherly draws his left hand away from Faust's reach, Faust responds by grabbing Etherly's neck with both hands and only removes his hands from Etherly's neck after Etherly has been pushed down onto the hood of the patrol car by his neck.) I don't think it's humanly possible to not physically struggle with someone who has just pinned you to a car by your neck. Bottom line, I think Faust's mistake here was selecting a force tactic that was guaranteed to result in a struggle. Once he did that, the escalated levels of force that came later were inevitable.
If McGinn wants another term he's got to step up and let SPD know that a new day is here. They can act like professionals or get jobs in Idaho.
The amazing thing is the officer behaved this way knowing he was on video tape. Who knows what could have happened off camera.
It is frustrating to be a cop and have to deal with crap characters like this idiot, but that's a big part of the job. Can't handle it? Do something else.
As the situation escalated, were the officers' tactics effective in de-escalating the situation? Nope, they made it worse - far worse.
Was Etherly an innocent victim? At first, yes - they rolled up on him like he was a perp, not someone they wanted to get information from. But man, he was willfully and progressively more uncooperative. Egan loses a lot of credibility by not admitting the obvious - he spat on the officer. I don't blame him for doing it, and it doesn't justify the officer's response; but it rightly changes the legal context, as well as public perception.
Will it result in criminal charges against the officer(s)? Not a chance.
Will it result in discipline against the officer? Yes, probably a mild rebuke.
Does it uphold the DOJ findings? 1000%.
Does it mean it's business as usual at SPD? Not necessarily. It takes time to undo years of training and culture. The fact that it was already referred internally to OPA suggests maybe at least leadership recognizes the problems with the way this encounter was handled, even if it's not yet proactively preventing them.
Do Diaz and the SPDG need to go? Probably. I don't see how you can change the culture of the department without major structural change.
Is McGinn to blame? He's come off weak-willed in relation to the SPD and SPDG, but I'm not sure any mayor would have much choice. Both organizations are a little too entrenched. It'll take years of DOJ involvement to break the faustian bargain we have with law enforcement today.
Did Egan and the Stranger oversell this video? Egregiously. It's bad, but not nearly as cut and dry as they made it out to be. Not even close.
Given the situation -- the police were outnumbered in a somewhat hostile environment -- I'm willing to grant them a little leniency when judging the speed of their decisions. Of course, I'm also willing to grant they had probably cause or at least reason to control the suspect while questioning him.
I promise the police know both of the other men at the bus stop and had reason to fear their ability to quickly become threatening.
Heck, I know crazy legs by reputation and from his history with the SPD.
That's reasonable. This seems like a failure in training. Keep in mind, the suspect is a big man in a very public setting. I doubt he would have stood and detained / arrested himself if only the police asked nicely. Then again, if one of the officers had at least tried asking nicely, we'd be without a scandal.