By David Foster, The Trentonian
TRENTON — Lael Queen was
carrying his clean laundry like a baby when he heard the footsteps behind him.
A Trenton police officer then
allegedly started assaulting the 31-year-old and told him to stop resisting
arrest.
“I’m not resisting arrest
because I’m not under arrest, they’re attacking me,” Queen recounted of the
July 4 incident on Monday. “Four or five other officers then jumped on me. They
couldn’t wrestle me to the ground, so the officer that attacked me told the K-9
officer to sick the dog on me.”
Pictures Queen provided to The
Trentonian show chunks of his left leg and thigh missing due to the alleged
police dog attack.
The lifelong resident said the
K-9 dog was still attached to his leg as he was handcuffed.
“They had to choke the dog to
get him off of me,” he said. “He was not responding to the call signs to let go
of my leg.”
As the dog attacked him, Queen
said the officers were still kicking and punching him.
Another photo shows a handful
of cuts and bruises on his face.
Queen says the incident
occurred that holiday afternoon because he videotaped the same cops allegedly
beating up a female outside of a laundromat on the 900 block of Martin Luther
King Jr. Boulevard where he was washing his clothes.
“They slammed her into the
wall, slammed her onto the ground and then the other officer jumped on top of
her and starting punching her in the face,” Queen said, describing what
happened to the woman who is an acquaintance. “I pulled out my camera phone and
started recording them assaulting the girl.”
Queen said he was standing on
the corner near Kirkbride Avenue 10 to 15 feet away from the officers when one
of the cops told him he was interfering with a police investigation.
“I told them I’m not
interfering with anything,” he said. “I’m just videotaping y’all beating up
this girl, which is my right.”
After leaving the laundromat
briefly and then returning for his clothes, he was again confronted by the cops
shortly before the alleged attack on him began.
Even as he was cuffed, Queen
said the excessive force continued.
“They were pulling me by my
hair and I have dreadlocks,” he said.
One of his shoes apparently
also fell off during the incident and he got it back while in the back seat of
the cop car.
“Another officer comes in,
opens the other door and throws it at me and hits me in the face with my own
shoe,” Queen said.
Queen was taken to the
hospital, where he remained until early Saturday morning, when he was
transported to Trenton police lockup.
The mechanic said he was in
custody for 10 hours before being released. He is charged with obstruction of
justice, resisting arrest and charging an officer.
On Monday morning, Queen
pleaded not guilty to the charges in Trenton municipal court.
“I never made a forward
aggressive motion toward them,” he said.
Queen claims the authorities
confiscated his phone and erased the video of police beating up the woman
before giving him back the device.
But in addition to that video,
which still may be able to be retrieved, Queen said one of his friends recorded
footage of him getting roughed up by police.
“I got beat up because I
videotaped them doing wrong,” Queen said. “If cops were doing their job the
right way, they shouldn’t have been concerned about me videotaping it. It’s
just ridiculous what they do to us out here.”
Allegations of excessive force
are nothing new against Trenton police.
In an eerily similar case, the
city paid $80,000 in October to settle a lawsuit from a state worker who was
allegedly roughed up by several city cops when he refused to turn over his cell
phone.
The Trentonian previously
reported Neal Costanzo, a state Department of Community Affairs employee, was
taking pictures with his cell phone of Trenton cops arresting a 55-year-old
woman in a wheelchair, who allegedly verbally abused and physically attacked a
NJ Transit bus driver.
After police confiscated phones
of several other bystanders and deleted photos of the woman’s arrest, Costanzo
was taken to the ground and roughed up by several officers for failing to
comply.
Costanzo, who was 31 at the
time, eventually offered up the phone, but he was taken to police headquarters
and then released after he was issued a summons for obstruction.
Last June, a 20-year-old
recorded audio of a police officer allegedly punching him in the face after
asking the officer for his badge number.
“That’s my (expletive) badge
number right there,” the cop says in the recording. “Shut the (expletive) up.”
In February 2012, video from La
Guira Bar captured city police officers allegedly using excessive force in two
arrests.
There is a civil lawsuit
against the city and the Trenton Police Department for the actions of the
officers that night. Officer Nidia Colon is also facing criminal official misconduct
charges for her role in one arrest.
In December 2012, Steven
Jennette ended up in a coma for two days after being taken into custody by
Trenton police.
Jennette remembers being
punched and sprayed with pepper spray by city police before waking up at
Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton.
Just Friday, Mayor Eric Jackson
heard a complaint during his visit to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen from a
resident that alleged cops were verbally abusive toward him.
Jackson, who was just sworn in
on July 1, said he has concerns about the allegations and expects police
officers to act professionally while on duty.
On Monday, Jackson said he is
in the process of investigating the Queen incident.
“It would be premature for me
to speak to it until all the facts are in,” he said in a statement. “As I have
consistently said, I am committed to ensuring that everyone -- from our police
officers to members of our community -- work together to make Trenton a safer
city and every incident involving law enforcement will be judged by that
metric.”
Acting Police Director Ernest
Parrey Jr., whom Jackson appointed the day he was sworn in, did not return a
message seeking comment.
Cops Choke and Bloody Marijuana
Suspect in San Antonio
There’s a teenaged pot smoker
in San Antonio, Texas who's luckier than he might imagine. Put into a
non-sanctioned choke hold during his arrest by a local police officer, he’s
still alive today to tell his story. Many other police brutality incidents
around the U.S. result in serious injury or even death.
San Antonio Park Police Officer
Michael Ramirez allegedly saw the unnamed 16-year-old smoking a joint at 500 W.
Market St. on May 4. Claiming the suspect initially tried to run, Ramirez
placed him in a choke hold for over two minutes, caught on ideo video by an
unidentified Facebook user, who posted it.
The bloodied face of the
unknown 16-year-old.
Sounds of the teen violently
retching and gasping for breath can clearly be heard in the disturbing video.
The suspect appears to not be resisting whatsoever in the first two-plus
minutes of the recording, but then begins to panic and thrashesightly, at which
point Ramirez lifts him off the ground and slams his head into the wall of the
building on the street where this happened. Ramirez then wrestles him the
ground as three bike cops help out. One of the cops kneels squarely on the
teen's face as blood splatters on the sidewalk.
While an investigation is
ongoing, the teen has been charged with resisting arrest and evading arrest,
both Class A misdemeanors; assault of a public servant, a third degree felony;
and possession of less than two ounces of marijuana (he was found with 1.9
grams of pot on him), a Class B misdemeanor. According to the police report,
the teen was treated for his injuries, a hurt knee (and assumedly his bloodied
face) at Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, given a prescription for pain
medication and crutches, and told not to report for work for at least three
days.
The use of a choke hold, never
part of official police procedure in San Antonio, has been seriously frowned
upon after another victim of a police choking, 44-year-old Eli Montesinos
Delgado, was killed by a cop during an arrest in 1997. The local Bexar County's
chief medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Police in San Antonio are
not taught to use choke holds, then Police Chief Al Phillipus noted at the
time. "But we feel that, in
situations where an officer may be fighting for his life, we have to leave that
option open to him at his own discretion," he added. Though the
stomach-turning video of the San Antonio teen’s arrest begins after he's
already being choked, it does not ever appear that he was either violent or
threatening the officer's life.
“The officer resorted to
dangerously excessive force in a situation that did not involve serious danger
to himself,” Krause Yang, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project,
says about Ramirez, who has not been suspended or reaasigned. “In fact, it
appears that the 16-year-old was the one who acted in a relatively calm manner
while Ramirez unnecessarily escalated the situation into a scary one. Choking a
person for over a minute would cause anyone to panic.”
Here are some other recent
incidents of police brutality:
• In Lansing, Michigan, a cop
pushes a wheelchair-bound man over onto the sidewalk, then places him under
arrest after his foot was merely rolled over.
• In Tuscon, Arizona, a cop
shoves an unsuspecting woman to the ground.
• In Phoenix, a cop tackles an
ASU professor for jaywalking and not handing over her ID.
• In Los Angeles, a California
Highway Patrol cop beats a grandmother on the shoulder of a highway.
• In Tampa, a SWAT raid leaves
an alleged marijuana dealer dead. Police find less than a gram in the house.
• In Westbury, New York, a cop
assaults a 20-year-old man for no apparent reason.
It’s abundantly clear that cops
are out of control. When did police become overlords with only the most meager
threats of a trial resulting from their blood-curdling violence? Where is the
oversight and accountability? Police departments rally behind cowboy cops, and
time and again little or nothing is done to rein them in or mete out genuine
justice. This cannot be allowed to continue.
