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The Fourth Stop
Freddie Gray investigative files go to prosecutors, police say
At the same press conference, Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis revealed for the first time that there was a fourth stop made between the time Gray was placed in the transport van and when he arrived at the police department's Western District building.
Last week, Davis said there were three stops: the first to put leg irons on Gray, the second "to deal with Mr. Gray" (an incident, he said, that remained under investigation) and the third to pick up a prisoner in an unrelated matter.
The new stop, which "was discovered from a privately owned camera," Davis said Thursday, came between the first and second stops.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Re: The Fourth Stop
Freddie Gray’s Injury and the Police ‘Rough Ride’
By MANNY FERNANDEZAPRIL 30, 2015
In Baltimore, they call it a rough ride. In Philadelphia, they had another name for it that hints at the age of the practice — a nickel ride, a reference to old-time amusement park rides that cost five cents. Other cities called them joy rides.
The slang terms mask a dark tradition of police misconduct in which suspects, seated or lying face down and in handcuffs in the back of a police wagon, are jolted and battered by an intentionally rough and bumpy ride that can do as much damage as a police baton without an officer having to administer a blow.
The exact cause of the spinal injury that Freddie Gray suffered while in police custody in Baltimore before his death on April 19 has not been made clear. The police have said that he was not strapped into a seatbelt, a violation of department policy. That has led some to wonder whether he was deliberately left unbuckled, reminiscent of a practice that while little-known has left behind a brutal, costly legacy of severe injuries and multimillion-dollar settlements.
“I never saw it, but I’ve heard about it,” said Bernard K. Melekian, the undersheriff of Santa Barbara County, Calif., who is a former director of the Justice Department’s community-oriented policing office and a former police chief in Pasadena, Calif. “My sense was that that kind of behavior had long been gone.”
The tradition was regarded as a technique by aggressive officers to inflict punishment on those they arrested without ever being accused of physically assaulting them with their weapons or hands. For a suspect with hands cuffed behind him, seated on a thin bench in the back of a speeding police van, a sudden stop or a sharp turn or a bumpy road can do as much damage as a physical assault.
For example, in June 1980, Freddie Franklin was walking on 75th Street on the South Side of Chicago with a friend when, he claimed, a group of police officers wrongfully arrested him, placed him in handcuffs and forced him into the back of a police wagon. He landed face down on the floor of the vehicle. Two officers drove the van recklessly and erratically, in order to throw him around the floor of the van, he claimed in a federal lawsuit. According to court documents, by the time Mr. Franklin arrived at the police station, he lay bleeding, after biting off his lower lip.
In the Chicago case, Mr. Franklin was black, as were the two officers who were driving the van.
“It’s sort of a retaliatory gesture,” said Robert W. Klotz, a police-procedures expert who lives in Maryland and who is a former deputy chief of police of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. “It’s one of those nebulous type of things where the individual feels they’ve been subjected to it because they’ve been mouthy. The officers say they have no intent in doing anything. It winds up in a he said-she said situation.”
It remains unclear what happened to Mr. Gray after his arrest by Baltimore officers on April 12 and whether his injuries occurred while he was being transported. Police officials said Mr. Gray, 25, a black man whose funeral prompted looting and arsons this week, should have received medical treatment at the scene of the arrest. At least two other Baltimore men, Jeffrey Alston and Dondi Johnson, were paralyzed after police van rides in two separate cases that led to lawsuits. Mr. Alston, paralyzed from the neck down, settled for $6 million in 2004.
Civil rights lawyers, former police chiefs and police-procedures experts said it was impossible to know how widespread the rough-riding practice has been throughout the country. Allegations have surfaced over the past three decades in Philadelphia, Aurora, Ill., a Chicago suburb, and elsewhere.
In Chicago, the American Civil Liberties Union represented Mr. Franklin in the federal lawsuit that he filed against six police officers, alleging civil rights violations and injuries that required him to undergo two reconstructive surgeries on his mouth. The city settled the case for $135,000.
And although the city’s lawyers denied the officers had given Mr. Franklin a rough ride, the case caused Chicago police officials to stop using wagons to transport suspects and use squad cars instead, said Edwin C. Yohnka, a spokesman for the A.C.L.U. of Illinois. The same year Mr. Franklin was injured, another handcuffed man suffered a broken neck after he fell off a bench in the back of a police van after the vehicle made a sharp turn. He won a $900,000 settlement.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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