Cop dumps quadriplegic man out of his wheechair
Police Suspended for Wheelchair Dumping
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Four Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies have been suspended after purposely tipping a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair at a jail, authorities said Tuesday.
Orient Road Jail surveillance footage from Jan. 29 shows veteran deputy Charlette Marshall-Jones, 44, dumping Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searching him on the floor after he was brought in on a warrant after a traffic violation.
Sterner said when he was taken into a booking room and told to stand up, Jones grew agitated when he told her that he could not.
"She was irked that I wasn't complying to what she was telling me to do," he told The Tampa Tribune.
"It didn't register with her that she was asking me to do something I can't do."
Jones has been suspended without pay, and Sgt. Gary Hinson, 51, Cpl. Steven Dickey, 45 and Cpl. Decondra Williams, 36 have also been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter said.
"The actions are indefensible at every level," Chief Deputy Jose Docobo said. "Based on what I saw, anything short of dismissal would be inappropriate."
He said the officers' actions were an aberration.
Yes, just another story documenting the callous abuse of power by law enforcement. Unbelieveable, but... not, right?
But it's also an example of how inept the media is at covering disability. The Associated Press headline: "Police suspended for wheelchair dumping"
"Wheelchair dumping" is ambiguous, obnoxiously imprecise, and goes for the shock value at the expense of even mentioning the victim involved. "Man dumped from wheelchair by cop" would have preserved the news shock value while also speaking the truth.
In any case, "wheelchair dump" has another meaning. "Dump" (also known as "rake" or "squeeze") refers to the seat angle on a wheelchair. To a seasoned wheelchair user, a story titled "wheelchair dumping" suggests discussion of the intricacies of butt comfort, balance, and leverage to push oneself. To a wheelchair user, the headline is not only insulting, it makes no sense.
The video of the abuse shows the police officer walking behind the man in the wheelchair and abruptly tipping the chair forward so the seat is at much more than a 45-degree angle from normal. Sterner attempts, briefly, to hold onto the arms before falling forward head first and landing hard on the floor. He is then rolled around on the floor and searched before being placed roughly back in his chair. The TV news report showing this video includes footage of Sterner outside, wearing sunglasses and using his arms and hands with some difficulty. He explains to the news camera that he has no feeling from the chest down and did not know at first how badly he was injured from the fall, but thought he might have broken some ribs.
12 comments:
This is outrageous. Every law enforcement officer in that video needs to be stripped of their position and possible serve time in jail. Certainly, they should never again be allowed a job of public trust.
I'll remember your explanation of "wheelchair dumping" in my news meeting today. Thanks.
I received quite a few emails on this incident yesterday. The first thing I could think of at first was at least these deputies were careless enough to do it in front of their own surveillance cameras. That might sound strange I guess to some people but most often and much too often, incidents like this happen outside any cameras and they never really come to light.
The police's response to video cameras both surveillance and privately owned is that there are no dark alleys left. I don't know if that's true but they do bring misconduct that otherwise no one would know about to light.
Then again, they were in a jail facility where those cameras are everywhere which makes me think that further investigation into this agency and its jail is definitely warrented because what was caught on video was their own culture rather than an isolated incident of serious misconduct. Firing these deputies won't do much to change that by itself but then I don't really subscribe to the "bad apple" theory.
It's not just deputies, it's security guards in mental hospitals for example. I heard a horror story recently from a man about his wife who's disabled with a form of muscular dystrophy and is in a wheelchair. She was experiencing mental symptoms as a side effect from new medication and the police decided she was ODing on some prescribed pain killer never prescribed to her, never in her possession and not found in her toxicology test. They made a value call based on prejudice that people experiencing mental symptoms are always drug addicts and her life became a nightmare because of it. So instead of being hospitalized for the bad reaction to the drug, she was taken to a mental facility,
It's a long story but three days after the original incident when her husband finally tracked her down, he saw her lying on the ground next to her wheelchair in the hallway of a hospital with a security guard trying to lift her body up off the ground with his foot. He's suing and he's got a lot of witness statements.
Here's a better local TV story on the incident:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYMKyJRAabE
There might be one positive thing in this story and that it that the Chief Deputy did not try to defend their actions. Of course they should be dismissed, but rarely do the police ever criticize their own. And they usually suspended with pay!
Many readers will be familiar with the Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport a few months ago by the RCMP. Even though the officers clearly acted inappropriately and aggressively and caused this man's unnecessary death, the higher ups would not call into question the actions of their own. It's very common.
I am disgusted by the horrible treatment of Mr. The Chief needs to look deeper and see that it is not an aberration and cops abuse people all the time.
He's obviously hurt, he starts spazzing immediately after they put him back in his chair. They probably saw that as some kind of evidence that he wasn't really paralyzed; people don't usually know that paralyzed muscles can still spasm.
Ignorant. They could put an end to all of these incidents with a simple "Introduction to disability"-type course for law enforcement.
The deputy chief is faced with a video of obvious and serious police misconduct and understands that there's no point in defending the deputies' actions. He or she will look stupid and could potentially encourage outside agencies to come in to investigate, the last thing any agency wants.
I think the deputy who pushed the man out of the wheel chair is going to be fired. Suspensions for the others would be probable except for the fact that supervisors were involved so possibly demotions or even terminations there. It will be interesting to see what happens to them. But a systemic investigation of the department and jail is in order. It will be interesting to see how they address that or try to get out of it.
My guess is that the management will try to isolate the deputies as aberrations to a pristine agency. Hopefully, there will be those who call them on their crap fairly quickly. I think there would be.
I'm not sure how many law enforcement agencies teach sensitivity training. Many do for race, some for gender. I'm not sure with the disabled communites. None of the ones in my area do, except in my city for the Deaf community in large part because there's a large community here because of the state school.
I'm not sure the training will work by itself. They have to see this man as a person and it's clear on the video, they don't. He's dehumanized. How is the agency going to address that?
okay... if the guy was in a wheelchair and shows signs that he has some physical limitations and shows no physical intent to hurt the officers WHY are they doing something so inconsiderate/stupid/unprofessional/ect. to someone that that is diffrent than the norm? His diffrentness is just more obvious than my ADD.
With the death by Taser (and kneeling on the back of the fallen man's neck) here in Vancouver, it was all caught on video and still the RCMP defended their actions. The RCMP often police themselves and investigates their own, so I assumed it would work in the police detachment shown on the tape. No points for the Chief, then, obviously.
This incident makes me wonder if our local police and RCMP have any sensitivity training around disability. I know they do around gender and sexual orientation. But still, they are police and they dehumanize people on a daily basis. In Vancouver, the police are being investigated for many instances of assault etc. Sadly,this is not an unusual thing in any police force.
Here's another scandal involving a Canadian police force.
I read that the sheriff apologized for the incident, which is incredibly rare in law enforcement. He must have worked it out with the department's labor union first.
They booked Deputy Charlotte Marshall-Jones this morning at the county jail. She may face criminal charges in relation to this incident.
Law Enforcement and Disability - The Bigger Picture of the "Wheelchair Dumping" Controversy.
On February 12th the story about how Charlette Marshall-Jones, of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, tipped Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searched him on the floor was all over the news wires and is now all over the disability blogosphere.
What happened was a terrible event. But it is more than that. This isn't one event. There is a bigger picture here that as a community we need to grasp.
Perhaps not so publicized yet just as heinous, if not more so is what happened to Bill Trask, a developmentally disabled man who, after his time in the local jail has been left so traumatized that he is no longer independent at all.
The same week, Jason Swift, a man with a mental health condition who was in crisis, was shot dead by law enforcement officers who responded with force rather than make attempts to de-escalate the situation and reassure the terrified man. His mother had called 911 for assistance in getting her son taken to a nearby psychiatric facility.
This lack of knowledge of disability and the callous disregard for people with disabilities is more than just a single event of “wheelchair dumping” and as a community we should be more than just outraged because of a single incident. We should be advocating for a broad solution to deal with what is a pervasive, and (in the case of Jason Swift and many other individuals with mental illness) potentially life-threatening problem.
www.DayinWashington.com
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