From: The Desert Sun
By Bret Kellman 5/31/16
Court officials have released surveillance footage showing a violent arrest that led to the firing of two Indio police officers and cost the city $140,000 in an excessive force lawsuit.
The officers were arrested in 2014 but acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing last week. The video, which was filmed by a motion-detecting security camera and spans about a minute, was the central piece of evidence in their trial.
Both officers are now attempting to get their jobs back, according to their attorneys.
The video was obtained exclusively by The Desert Sun from the Riverside County Superior Court. Until now, the only members of the public who have seen the footage are court staff, the jurors and a handful of people who attended the officers’ trial.
The video shows former officer Gerardo Martinez pinning a suspect to the ground while he is punched and kicked by another former officer, Charles Holloway. Martinez never throws a punch, but he was accused of attempting to cover up the actions of his partner because his report on the arrest made no mention of Holloway’s strikes.
Jim Bueermann, a nationally-recognized policing expert, said the video showed a questionable use of force by Holloway, even if he was acquitted by a jury.
Bueermann said he didn’t see any obvious wrongdoing by Martinez, but it is standard police procedure to make a report anytime an officer uses as much force as Holloway did. Martinez’s attorney said the strikes weren’t reported because his client didn’t see them.
“People are going to look at this and say it’s an unwarranted use of force. Even if it doesn’t rise to a criminal offense, people are going to say ‘that’s just not right,’” said Bueermann, a former Redlands police chief who is now president of the Police Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based law enforcement think tank.
“The challenge for the police department is that they need to remind people that once the chief was aware of what happened, he took the right steps and terminated the officers.”
Indio has done just that, highlighting in prior statements how the police department acted swiftly on the allegations against the officers. The Indio Police Department forwarded the case to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which conducted an independent investigation, ultimately leading to the arrests, trial and acquittal.
The case also went to civil court, where the suspect, Ruben Martinez, a known gang member who has been convicted of burglary and threatening his mother with a gun, filed an excessive force lawsuit accusing officers of showing “callous, reckless and wanton” disregard for his civil rights. The suit was settled in April.
“What happened to me I did not deserve, because I was on the ground with my hands behind my back,” Ruben Martinez told The Desert Sun in a jailhouse letter several days after his arrest.
Indio has done just that, highlighting in prior statements how the police department acted swiftly on the allegations against the officers. The Indio Police Department forwarded the case to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which conducted an independent investigation, ultimately leading to the arrests, trial and acquittal.
The case also went to civil court, where the suspect, Ruben Martinez, a known gang member who has been convicted of burglary and threatening his mother with a gun, filed an excessive force lawsuit accusing officers of showing “callous, reckless and wanton” disregard for his civil rights. The suit was settled in April.
“What happened to me I did not deserve, because I was on the ground with my hands behind my back,” Ruben Martinez told The Desert Sun in a jailhouse letter several days after his arrest.
On the other side of the crevice, the suspect stepped into view of the camera. The suspect was then cornered by Officer Martinez, who raised his police baton, threatening to strike the suspect, who dropped to the ground and lay on his stomach. Martinez then pinned the man to the ground with his knee and began handcuffing him, starting with his left hand.
Seconds later, Holloway rounded the corner of the storage container, coming into view of the camera. Holloway rushes into the frame, kicking the prone man in his left hip. Holloway then kicked the man a second time, then punched him seven times in the upper body, with two punches appearing to go towards the suspect’s head. Holloway then stepped away from the suspect, before coming back and putting his foot on the man, which prosecutors characterized as a “stomp” during the officers’ trial.
Martinez then appeared to look up at the security camera, saying something to Holloway. No more strikes occurred after that.
When reached for comment on Tuesday, Michael Schwartz, an attorney for Holloway, said that the surveillance footage was just a “snippet” of the arrest, which did not give the public the full perspective of the entire case against the officer.
For example, Schwartz noted that the camera’s view is from above and well lit, but the officer’s view is dark and horizontal. Secondly, Holloway saw the suspect and his partner — with a baton drawn — drop to the ground together, then had to decide what to do in a matter of seconds, all while running at full speed. From his perspective, “the fight is on,” Schwartz said.
The jury considered all of this and more, Schwartz said. The general public will most likely make a snap judgement from the video alone.
“The court of public opinion is not a court,” he said. “It is basically a mob-rules forum, and many times what we see in these cases is basically an electronic lynching in the media.”
At trial, Schwartz argued that Holloway’s punches and kicks were “distraction strikes,” intended to make the suspect easier to handcuff. Schwartz noted that the video shows that the suspect’s right hand is free during the arrest. The jury agreed.
However, Bueermann said Tuesday that this “distraction strike” argument doesn’t make sense because Holloway doesn’t appear to actually try to handcuff the suspect.
Holloway kicks the suspect twice, then punches him three times, then pauses, then punches him four more times, then walks away, turning his back to the suspect, all while the man’s right hand is free. At one point, the suspect appears to voluntarily put his right hand behind his back, but the officer keeps punching him.
“Common sense and logic would say, instead of striking the guy who has put his hands behind his back, why don’t you hold that hand so the other officer can put the cuffs on?” Bueermann said.
Schwartz claims Holloway tried to restrain the suspect’s arm during the two-second pause between the third and fourth punches.
The attorney for Officer Martinez, Steve Sanchez, argued that his client didn’t report Holloway’s punches and kicks in the arrest report because he never actually saw the strikes.
Sanchez said Martinez was so “tunnel-vision focused” on handcuffing the suspect and listening to other officers who are talking to him through an earpiece that he never saw that his partner was punching and kicking the man he was pinning to the ground.
But he did see the camera.
“Officer Martinez also notices the camera after he successfully handcuffs Ruben,” Sanchez said in an email. “This is further proof that he did not notice the distraction strikes used by Officer Holloway. Why would he intentionally omit the strikes if he knew their actions were memorialized on video?”