(MintPress) – A decorated veteran police officer in Minneapolis is being investigated over an alleged off-duty attack that left a man in need of multiple brain surgeries and in a struggle for survival. The incident is a microcosm for a rash of police misconduct and brutality instances that has forced departments to hold officers accountable.
According to the Pioneer Press, Sgt. David Clifford is currently on paid administrative leave, despite having an already-tarnished record that required the Minneapolis Police Department to pay out a $1 million civil lawsuit after a botched 2010 drug raid saw Clifford and two other SWAT members act as defendants in a case for a woman severely burned by a flash-bang grenade.
In its original report, the Minneapolis Star Tribune detailed an instance that left the leader of the Minneapolis SWAT team, Clifford, in jail after being charged with third-degree assault. Clifford was released from jail after making his first court appearance and posting bail on Tuesday.
Surveillance footage of the restaurant Clifford was at shows him approaching a man on his cell phone, leaning over the table and speaking into the man’s ear. The man, Brian Vander Lee, began to stand up when Clifford punched him in the face, sending Vander Lee to the ground and his head striking the concrete patio floor.
City Pages reports that Clifford had allegedly asked Vander Lee to stop using vulgar language while on his cell phone. When Vander Lee refused to stop, Clifford approached Vander Lee and struck him. Clifford said he was using self-defense because he felt threatened by the language and alleging that Vander Lee began to stand up during their confrontation.
Anoka County Sheriff’s Commander Paul Sommer told the Star Tribune that witnesses and the video suggest Clifford was in no danger and that he instigated the conflict by being the antagonist.
“This was not a fight in any sense of the word,” Sommer said. “This is a one-sided assault. Vander Lee is starting to stand up. Before he reaches his feet, Clifford has hit him.”
Clifford could face up to five years in prison, but critics of police review boards and accountability officials suggest that is unlikely. Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska and an expert on police accountability, told The Atlantic that officers accused of misconduct in any way are often back to serving in the very communities they were accused of an offense in shortly after the accusation.
“Those review boards that exist and have existed for many years around the country … what have they ever done?” Walker said. “Find me a case where they have gotten some officers fired or even significant discipline.”
Victims come forward
In recent weeks, stories of alleged police misconduct across the country have inundated the media. At the end of May, a woman in Iowa spoke out after police hogtied and tased her while she was in the back of a squad car.
In New York, an NYPD officer admitted to falsely arresting a black man and then professing that he had “fried another n——-.” The officer, Michael Daragjati, said he fabricated a resisting arrest charge after the man mouthed off to him. Members of the department wrote the judge of the case asking for leniency after it was reported that he could face 57 months in prison. Daragjati was fired from the force after admitting his actions. The case never went to a civil review board.
Other recent instances across the country include a Chattanooga Police Department officer be relieved of his duties after being under the influence of alcohol while on the job. A family in El Monte, California is accusing police officers of brutality after a schizophrenic man died after being taken into custody. Attorneys representing the family say police struck the man around 20 times with a flashlight, placed him in a choke hold and shocked him four times with a Taser.
Another case out of Chicago details how police used a Taser on a woman who was eight months pregnant while her two children were in close proximity. Tiffany Rent sued the department after her treatment that stemmed from an argument over a parking ticket.
“Following the brutal Taser gun attack, plaintiff Rent was forcefully taken to the ground and left there while defendants Pippen, Forgue, Smith and the unknown City of Chicago police officers mocked and laughed at plaintiff Rent writhing on the ground in pain. Plaintiff Rent’s children who were with her at the time … were also unreasonably detained and falsely imprisoned by defendants.”
Organizing the unorganized
In May, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, launched a website dedicated to compiling statistics and reports of police misconduct around the United States. A 2010 report, the most recent in the group’s database, showed 6,613 law enforcement officers involved in allegations of misconduct, with 1,575 (23.8 percent) of those pertaining to excessive force. In comparison, 9.3 percent of the complaints included sexual misconduct and 7.2 percent involved fraud/theft.
As a result of the claims, departments and states were forced to pay out more than $346.5 million for civil-judgments and settlements related to police misconduct.
Cato says the independent study of departments is needed because the few that claim to track complaints and statistics rarely can provide detailed evidence.
“Only a small fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies actually track their own misconduct in a semi-public manner, and even when they do, the data they provide is generic and does not specify what misconduct occurred, who did it, and what the end result was,” the website read.
The National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), an organization created by the National Lawyers Guild, represents clients in cases of alleged police misconduct. A lawyer for the group recently won a federal civil rights lawsuit for the client, Michael O’Brien, who sued the city of Boston for excessive force. O’Brien claimed that an officer with the department hit him and put him in a chokehold while O’Brien was filming another officer on his cell phone. O’Brien claims to now have a brain injury that leads to debilitating headaches and dizziness.
Dennis Kenney, a policing expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the more incidents that the public catches wind of that involve police misconduct, the less likely they will be to cooperate when questioned by police. He said trust could eventually be undermined when citizens question law enforcement.
“If you think about how policing work works, it’s not technology driven: it’s the ability to get people to tell you what’s going on when it’s going on,” Kenney said in an interview with National Public Radio. “For that to happen, citizens obviously have to be willing to talk to you.”