Are the police in San Jose, CA. using "Resisting Arrest" too often when dealing with suspects?
Scott Wright was fixing the emergency brake on an old Cadillac in a parking lot near Willow Glen last year when the San Jose police rolled up. Within minutes, he had been shot with a Taser and beaten with batons, breaking his arm.
The cause of the trouble? Wright reached into his van to wash his greasy hands.
Police said they feared he was going for a weapon, but no weapon was found. Wright was charged with resisting arrest, but the district attorney dismissed the case before it got to trial.
What happened to Wright is no isolated event. Hundreds of times a year interactions between San Jose police and residents where no serious crime has occurred escalate into violence.
Many times the reason for the encounter is as innocuous as jaywalking, missing bike head lamps, or failing to signal a turn. But often, as the incidents develop, police determine the suspect is uncooperative and potentially violent and strike the first blow.
While many of those incidents raise questions about whether the police response was excessive, the department almost always dismisses such complaints about its behavior and limits public scrutiny of the cases, moves that tend to heighten distrust of the department, particularly in minority communities.
Last week, the Mercury News disclosed the existence of a cell phone video documenting one such confrontation between police wielding batons and a Taser and college student Phuong Ho, who police said was
resisting their instructions. It is rare for such a video to come to light, but allegations of excessive force are far from uncommon.
In recent months the Mercury News has reviewed 206 court cases in which the most serious charge against the defendant was a violation of California Penal Code section 148, the misdemeanor crime of resisting arrest or delaying or obstructing a police officer. Of those, 145 — 70 percent of the cases — involved the use of force by officers.
The review was launched following the April disclosure by the newspaper that San Jose charges far more people with resisting arrest, compared with its population, than any other major California city, and that a disproportionate number of those charged are Latino residents. State and county statistics show San Jose police charge people with resisting arrest, as the primary charge, three times a day on average.
Link:
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_13686438?nclick_check=1