In Enfield, Connecticut, a state attorney’s refusal to enforce a warrant to arrest a police officer for assault and evidence fabrication has led many to question whether there is a lack of accountability among the law enforcement community.
The warrant in question, submitted by Lt. Lawrence Curtis of the Enfield Police Department against Enfield K-9 Officer Matthew Worden, asserts that Worden attacked a suspect during an arrest in a manner that was “neither necessary nor needed.”
On April 1, per Worden’s arrest warrant application, Mark Maher, 24, and three friends — Leonard Hill, Elise Blais and Jenna Saleh — were drinking at a public boat launch outside of the facility’s posted hours. Public drinking is prohibited at the launch. According to Worden’s written police brutality complaint, as quoted by Curtis, a group of officers approached the drinkers, who were technically trespassing. Maher asserted that the officers almost immediately attacked the group, with one officer slamming Hill into the hood of Maher’s car, denting it. Asserting that he or anyone else in his group fought back or resisted, Maher reported that the officers pushed him to the ground, pinning him with a knee pressed against his back.
Maher was ultimately arrested for assault of an officer and resisting arrest by Worden. The police dashboard video presents a complicated, fast-moving scenario: After the officers approached the group, Hill seemed to pass something to Maher, prompting Worden and Officer Michael Emons to force Hill onto the hood of the car in order to handcuff him and pat him down. Following this, the officers motioned for Maher to be searched. After several items were removed from Maher’s pocket, the police took Maher down in a “pile-up.”
The officers had difficulty putting the handcuffs on Maher, which they initially read as Maher resisting arrest. The reports of the other police officers at the scene, however, clarify that Maher’s left arm was pinned underneath him due to the knee to his back, and that he was not resisting arrest at all. Worden, despite this, threw at least two reported punches to Maher’s shoulder in an attempt to get Maher to cooperate. Worden, according to the video, then took the time to adjust his glove before he threw the first punch. Even though Worden reported only hitting Maher’s shoulder, Maher was photographed at the police station with a severely bruised right eye.
In her dismissal of the arrest warrant, Hartford State’s Attorney Gail Hardy argued that there was not enough evidence to suggest that Worden’s actions were intentionally malicious. The fact that Worden filed a use of force report and called for emergency medical assistance for Maher suggested to her that Worden thought he was acting in accordance with his job, thereby validating his actions — however unfortunate they turned out to be.
“Although striking Maher may have violated Enfield Police Department’s use of force policies, Worden’s conduct seemed to be aimed at an attempt to restrain Maher who was resisting officers’ attempts to handcuff him, rather than an intention to inflict physical harm,” Hardy concluded.
While the question of what was passed between Maher and Hill begs the conclusion that the officers were concerned for their safety, a look at Worden’s police record shows a troubling pattern. Over the last seven years, according to the Hartford Courant, Worden has been the subject of 14 internal affairs investigations on charges ranging from being “rude and discourteous,” to racial profiling and improperly releasing his dog on a suspected burglary suspect. While he was exonerated in all of these cases, Worden has been suspended before due to a fight with a fellow officer during a domestic dispute with his then-girlfriend. The assault charges related to that incident were eventually dropped.
Worden received half of the nearly 100-officer police department’s citizen complaints in 2013. Worden is currently suspended with pay, pending City Council action on how to proceed.
The Worden case is part of a disturbing string of police brutality cases that have recently emerged in the media. In Syracuse, New York, during a June 28 situation that was partially recorded and released on YouTube, the city’s police may be sued in federal court for attacking a man that called 911 to break up a dispute outside of his home involving his daughter and a neighbor. After telling the officer that the fight — in which he was not involved — was over, he was referred by one officer to another officer, who, without clear provocation, grabbed him into a bearhug and held him in a chokehold as another officer punched him. The individual, Alonzo Grant, 53, was charged with resisting arrest and harassing and annoying the police.
In Seabrook, New Hampshire, two police officers have been fired and a third has been suspended without pay for allegedly beating a man in custody. The video of this beating has surfaced on YouTube. The man, Michael Bergeron, Jr., 19, was arrested for driving while intoxicated in 2009. The officers — Mark Richardson, Adam Laurent and Keith Dietenhofer — slammed Bergeron’s face into a wall while escorting him down a hallway and used pepper-spray on the man’s face after he fell backward. The video was released in January, but the officers’ conduct was not investigated until April.
Taken in conjunction with the cases of Guillermo Balseca, an Iraq War veteran who suffered bleeding and contusions around his brain due to being knocked off the deck of his home and beaten while unconscious by an off-duty Amtrak officer at the officer’s home, and Marlene Pinnock, a homeless woman who was attacked by a California Highway Patrol officer on a downtown Los Angeles freeway, there is a troubling trend of police across the nation showing a lack of restraint or rationality in using force.
Other recent examples include the incident with Eric Garner, a man who was placed in an illegal chokehold by a New York City police officer for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, resulting in the man’s death, and Jianqing Klyzek, who was hit with a battery of racial slurs and physical strikes from Chicago police in a failed raid of her tanning salon.