Wall of silence, secrecy shelters Henderson’s thugs
In the largest suburb of Las Vegas, Henderson Mayor Andy Hafen expressed remorse last week over injuries caused to the unresisting Adam Greene, who was in diabetic shock when city police beat and kicked him during a traffic stop in October 2010.
It was the first public comment on the incident by anyone on the City Council since it approved a $158,000 settlement with Greene, 38, on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
The traffic stop was videotaped by a Nevada Highway Patrol dashboard camera. That tape, which was released by Greene’s lawyer on Tuesday, showed police Sgt. Brett Seekatz kicking Greene in the head five times and another officer kneeing the unresponsive Greene — who had already been handcuffed — in the midsection four times, breaking his ribs. Highway Patrol troopers did not appear to hit or kick Greene, though one did level a cocked pistol at him and — somewhat bizarrely — kick his car window.
“Stop resisting moth-rfuck-r! Stop resisting moth-rfuck-r!” an officer yelled as the man lay on the ground, physically incapable of resisting.
Greene –a former basketball player for the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and himself the son of a highway patrolman — suffered broken ribs and bruises that didn’t heal for two months. The city attorney approved a $99,000 settlement with Greene’s wife — a sum just under the $100,000 that would have required the City Council’s approval. The state agreed to pay Greene $35,000, for a total settlement of $292,500.
Mayor Hafen said the Henderson Police Department modified its training and use-of-force policies after the incident, and “as a result, we have already seen the numbers of those types of incidents go down.”
Hafen said the mark of a good organization is the ability to learn from mistakes, own up to them and improve.
“We have tried to do that and will continue to do so in the future as we try to hold our officers and our department to the highest standards of accountability,” the mayor managed to say with a straight face.
Henderson City Councilman Sam Bateman said that while he doesn’t condone what happened to Greene, he understands emotions sometimes run high in police work. “I work with law enforcement all the time,” Bateman said. “They (police) didn’t know what they were dealing with, and sometimes they have to be aggressive to defuse a public threat.”
Officials wouldn’t specify how or if Seekatz was disciplined over the incident, saying the information is a personnel matter and will not be released. He remains a sergeant.
Officers Douglas Lynaugh, Francis Shipp and Seth Vanbeveren were named as the other officers who joined in, though it was unclear which managed to break Mr. Greene’s ribs.
“Henderson Police Chief Jutta Chambers ordered a closer look at the training Henderson officers receive,” according to a prepared statement. “The training on use of force techniques was subsequently modified.”
And now everything is hunky-dory?
Oh, please. This incident took place nearly a year and a half ago. Yet the public learned nothing about it until this week — and then only from Mr. Greene’s attorney? What if he’d kept silent? What would the public know today? Nothing. Henderson officials are suddenly “sorry” today — 16 months after this abomination — only because they were “outed.”
The only named culprit is still a sergeant, retaining all his rank and accrued seniority? The city won’t even detail what his discipline was? A day off with pay and a free round of drinks down at the Dew Drop Inn?
Henderson officers were clearly unaware they were being recorded by the highway patrolman’s dashboard camera, leaving the clear impression in the public’s mind today that this was and remains “standard operating procedure” in Hooterville. Why did use-of-force policies have to be (allegedly) changed, and how were they changed? Doesn’t that imply the Henderson officers’ actions seen here were in keeping with the use-of-force policies in place at the time? If so, why isn’t Henderson advertising for a new police chief?
(In fact, sources told the Review-Journal Feb. 15 that Henderson’s departing city manager has told Chief Chambers to clear out her desk and resign, pronto.)
Henderson police already had a reputation for amateurism and wildly inappropriate use of force — most infamously shooting and killing ice cream lady Deshira Selimaj, who had raced to the scene of a traffic stop to translate for her Albanian-born husband who was having health problems (a $700,000 settlement in 2009.) Has the police chief been dragged before the Council to publicly explain this latest abomination — or any of the others? Why not?
Chief Chambers should have held a press conference a year ago, making a clean breast of this incident as soon as details were known, promising a public investigation, firings if appropriate, and reform. The discipline of Sgt. Seekatz is not a “confidential personnel matter” — it has nothing to do with his health or domestic arrangements. Rather, full disclosure of how he was punished is vital is the Henderson Police hope to restore public confidence. And why wasn’t the officer who broke Mr. Greene’s ribs similarly singled out, along with the nature of HIS discipline? Breaking the ribs of comatose, handcuffed individuals is OK, as long as you lay off the head? What’s that called, “The Corleone Rule”?
“Sometimes the police need to be aggressive” in pulling an unresponsive man from a car and beating him? Why? Even if Mr. Greene had been drunk, this behavior was completely unwarranted. Once his car was stopped, it’s clear that Mr. Greene’s only offense was not shouting “Yes sir!” quickly enough. The behavior of the Henderson Police in this case wouldn’t have been appropriate even for military personnel occupying a captive nation.
Meantime, it now turns out Henderson officials can pay off an injured party with a sum as high as $99,000 without so much as a public vote? That’s a policy designed to sweep problems under the rug — the cut-off for full public disclosure should be lowered to something a lot closer to $10,000.
The mayor happily asserts the number of incidents of this nature has already dropped. Really? How many more of “those types of incidents” — easily hidden by staying under that $100,000 secret payoff limit — has the public not been told about? Three per year? Six? A dozen? Should St. Rose’s Hospital set up a special ward just for the parade of Henderson Police beating victims? Could we have a number, please — an itemized list of secret payoffs between $10,000 and $99,000 for the most recent eight years, at least?
Right now, all across the nation, a new police-beating video is going viral, and would-be tourists are adding “Henderson, Nevada” to the list of places they’re promising themselves never to go. Henderson’s silent police chief — assuming she even retains her job — and elected officials have a long hill to climb if local businesses aren’t to spend the next 20 years suffering the effects of those informal blacklists. Instead, they’re patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves that at least their bully-boys didn’t kill this one.
Because the payoff from taxpayer funds can be TWICE as expensive when you kill them.
February 27th, 2012 at 1:26 am
One of the only ways to stop this type of porcine brutality, in addition to sentencing these badged perps to decades of hard prison time in genpop, is to hold them PERSONALLY liable for any such acts of violence. In other words, no taxpayer money, or municipal insurance policies funded therefrom, shall be used to compensate Officer Oinky’s victims. Oinky himself would be held personally liable. If that means losing his pension, his home, his personal property, and everything else that he owns, then so be it. After all, was Oinky not operating outside the scope of his official duties when he committed these acts of tort? Why then should the government agency that employs him be held liable if didn’t sanction these acts? And of course no police department would ever own up to gratuitous violence being a part of its operational MO, now would it?
Let a precedent be set by one or two of these badged clowns being taken to the cleaners and acts of gratuitous porcine misconduct will disappear faster than ice in the Nevada desert in July. The victims might not get as much as if they’d gone after the local PD or municipal government, but one civil verdict in favor of a victim under this new standard would put an end to such acts of porcine violence in short order.