AND HE IS BLACK!
Clayton County, Georgia sheriff indicted on federal criminal charges for brutalizing detainees
Long-time Clayton County, Georgia, Sheriff Victor Hill was charged with four criminal offenses by a federal grand jury this month for brutalizing four detainees last year. Hill, who styles himself as a no-nonsense “law and order” sheriff, has been charged with abusing the civil rights of four detainees by ordering them to be strapped in restraining chairs for hours on end despite these individuals being fully cooperative and posing no threat.
Clayton County includes the southern suburbs of Atlanta and is the location of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the second busiest airport in the world.
The indictment against Sheriff Hill was unsealed on April 19 and he appeared in federal district court in Atlanta on Tuesday to plead not guilty. Hill is continuing to act as sheriff despite the indictment.
According to federal prosecutors, Hill directed his deputies to leave the four inmates, during different periods in 2020, tightly strapped to a restraining chair for long hours because either these detainees were deemed not submissive enough or Hill felt they were not respectful enough towards him.
One of the detainees, according to the indictment, was restrained for such a long duration and denied permission to go to the bathroom, that he urinated on himself.
Hill has also been accused of using his police force to intimidate and then arrest a landscaper identified as G.H. by sending a heavily armed squad of his deputies. The landscaper reportedly had engaged in an argument with a nearby Butts County deputy for non-payment of a bill for work the landscaper had performed at the deputy’s home.
After learning of this dispute, Hill called the landscaper, identifying himself as the Clayton County Sheriff, and asked why G.H. was “harassing his deputy.” Subsequently Sheriff Hill seems to have cooked up an unrelated misdemeanor “harassing communication” charge against the landscaper to arrest him. G.H. had placed several calls to Sheriff Hill using FaceTime in order to verify if it was indeed the Clayton County sheriff who had called him about a billing dispute.
Reflecting the all-too-common trait among leading police officials of unrestrained arrogance and a feeling of possessing untrammeled powers, Hill was quoted in the indictment as shouting at two of the victims using crude language to threaten even more torture.
“I’m a sit your ass in that chair for sixteen hours straight. Do you understand me? I need to hear from both of y’all that y’all not gonna show y’all’s ass in my county no more.”
Each of the detainees have stated that their abusive treatment by Hill “caused physical pain and resulted in bodily injury.”
The latest revelation of wanton police abuse comes in the midst of a spate of police killings which have sparked popular protests just within the first four months of this year. This includes the cold-blooded execution of 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29 by a Chicago police officer and at least 265 other police killings as of April 14 throughout the US. The victims are invariably youth or workers, especially those that are socially deprived and suffering mental health issues.
This is not the first time that police in Clayton County have been caught meting out brutal treatment. Last September a deputy working under Hill was fired after he and his partner were caught on camera brutally beating 26-year-old Roderick Walker.
Hill’s attorney Drew Findling expressed his outrage, accusing the Department of Justice of prosecuting his client for politically motivated reasons. According to Findling the injuries were mild and do not merit any scrutiny because they were not brutal enough.
“Sheriff Victor Hill is a beloved sheriff in his county. He is an anti-crime person. He wins overwhelming elections and the fact that these four innocuous allegations are the causation of a criminal case sends mixed messages from the Department of Justice,” Findling stated. Continuing, he claimed, “There are no physical injuries involved. Other cases that receive this type of indictment involve brutal injuries and crimes—there is nothing like that here.”
According to Findling, the investigation was initiated by the Trump administration after Sheriff Hill refused to house undocumented individuals arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Clayton County jails. Sheriff Hill purportedly did this because of his concern that the constitutional rights of those arrested by ICE would be violated.
This picture of Hill as a great defender of basic constitutional rights flies in the face of the utter contempt he is documented to have displayed towards one of the detainees last year.
The federal indictment cites the following assault on one of the detainees, identified as J.A., that took place in February 2020.
J.A. was arrested without incident for assaulting two women during a dispute at a grocery store in Clayton County. When he was brought for booking, Hill asked him what he was doing in Clayton County since it was not his place of residence. The detainee responded by saying: “It’s a democracy, sir. It’s the United States.”
“No, it’s not, not in my county,” responded Hill, according to the indictment.
When J.A. asked the Sheriff if he was not entitled to a fair and speedy trial, Hill allegedly stated, “You’re entitled to sit in this chair, and you’re entitled to get the hell out of my county and don’t come back. That’s what you’re entitled to. You sound like a damn jackass…”
Far from this prosecution being a case of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) concerned for mitigating rampant police abuse or for protecting detainees’ constitutional rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has overseen the Hill inquiry, revealed another motivation—to restore trust in law enforcement.
Christopher Macrae, the FBI assistant special agent in charge, explained, “Sheriff Hill is alleged to have abused his privileges and abandoned his responsibilities and the FBI is committed to restoring trust in law enforcement by holding him accountable ” (emphasis added).
Former federal prosecutor Bret Williams told 11 Alive, “the case will be difficult to prove, even if prosecutors have video from inside the jail.” In other words, Hill will more than likely be let off scot free just like most of the police personnel who are prosecuted.
The claim of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media that racism explains police violence, and it can be mitigated by increasing the number of minorities on police forces and in leadership, is belied in this latest example of police abuse. Sheriff Hill is in fact the first African American elected to lead the Clayton County Sheriff’s Department.
The police are “the special bodies of armed men” used by the ruling elite to protect their property interests and compel workers and youth to accept their exploitation even while the capitalists pursue policies to further the already obscene enrichment of the super-rich.
Only by overturning the capitalist system can the unending reign of police violence and murder be ended. This requires the mobilization of the masses under the leadership of the working class for socialism not just in the US but worldwide.
What Police Impunity Looks Like: “There Was No Discipline as No Wrongdoing Was Found”
To understand why police are so rarely held accountable for killings, you should know about Kawaski Trawick, and what didn’t happen to the officer who shot him.
A Closer Look
Examining the News
A jury’s conviction of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd is a historic moment, in large part because it’s an anomaly. Officers who kill civilians are rarely prosecuted, let alone convicted — many aren’t even disciplined by their departments.
To understand how police impunity works, it’s worth looking at another case, that of Kawaski Trawick.
Two years ago, Trawick was alone in his apartment in the Bronx when two New York City Police Department officers arrived in response to 911 calls about Trawick walking through the building with a serrated bread knife and a stick. Trawick, who had a history of mental health and drug issues, had locked himself out of his apartment but had gotten back in after firefighters pried open the door. When the police officers arrived minutes later, they pushed the door ajar and found Trawick, a personal trainer and dancer, standing near his stove, holding the knife and stick.
“Why are you in my home?” Trawick asked. Less than two minutes later, he lay dying on the floor. A few months ago, I examined what happened in those 112 seconds. Video from a body-worn camera shows one of the officers — Black and more experienced — repeatedly trying to stop his white, less experienced partner from using force.
“We ain’t gonna tase him,” Officer Herbert Davis told Officer Brendan Thompson, as Trawick stood about seven feet from them. Thompson fired his Taser anyway, which (as can happen) enraged Trawick, who ran toward the officers. Davis again tried to stop his partner, this time from shooting his gun. He briefly pushed Thompson’s gun down, saying, “No, no — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.”
Thompson fired three times, paused for a moment, and then fired a final shot. Trawick died almost instantly. You can see and hear it all for yourself, in a video we made using surveillance and body-worn camera footage. (Davis and Thompson both declined requests for comment.)
Last Wednesday marked two years since the shooting, so I checked in with the NYPD about it. The department had said late last year that it had finally finished its internal investigation and that the police commissioner — who has complete discretion over discipline, as many chiefs around the country do — would soon be deciding what to do.
Last week, the NYPD told me that Commissioner Dermot Shea had indeed ruled on the case. The officers were completely cleared. “There was no discipline as no wrongdoing was found,” the department said.
Here is the NYPD’s full statement. It noted that there was also a “tactical review” to determine “what, if anything, could have been done differently.”
Experts I spoke with pointed to a litany of poor decisions and tactics by the officers.
The officers could have tried to make a connection with Trawick, as the NYPD trains its officers to do, and at least answered his repeated questions about why they were there. They could have waited for help and “just closed the door,” as one former NYPD detective told me, since department policy is to “isolate and contain” people in crisis. They could have decided to not use force, as other officers did when they had encountered Trawick in a similar situation weeks before.
Thompson could have warned Trawick before firing his Taser, as the NYPD encourages officers to do so. After he used his Taser, Thompson could have kept it in his hand, rather than putting it on the ground and leaving himself with only his gun.
Yet as perplexing as the NYPD’s conclusion may seem, it is also the logical culmination of a series of decisions that have again and again narrowed the avenues for accountability.
The rare occasions in which officers have faced even the possibility of significant punishment have usually come after the public has seen what happened, for example, after a bystander filmed Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck. Trawick’s killing happened out of the public eye. And the NYPD worked to keep it that way.
For a year and a half, it refused to release body-worn camera footage, arguing in response to a public records request and lawsuit that doing so would “interfere” with the department’s internal investigation and would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
But the NYPD did offer its perspective about what happened. “It appears to be justified,” one of the NYPD’s top officials told reporters the day after the shooting.
The police’s perspective shaped the early coverage. Citing “law enforcement sources,” the New York Post reported that a “musclebound man” who was “nicknamed ‘Chaos’” had been shot “when he charged at cops twice with a stick and a knife.” (Trawick was about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, and his family told me they’ve never heard that nickname. The video shows he ran at the officers once, after he was hit by a Taser.)
The NYPD eventually decided to release footage, after the Bronx District Attorney’s Office published it as part of a report last November that laid out its decision not to pursue criminal charges against the officers. The DA’s decision, too, was no surprise: Local prosecutors, who work closely with the police, are particularly hesitant to indict officers.
The DA’s report had troubling revelations buried inside it. While the report’s highlighted timeline didn’t mention it, the report revealed more than two dozen pages in that Davis had tried to stop his partner from shooting Trawick. It also disclosed that other officers had previously decided there was no need to use force when they answered remarkably similar calls involving Trawick. On page 36, the report cited those interactions as “examples of disparate outcomes that deserve mention.”
The DA’s report did not contain the full, unedited body-worn camera footage, and the NYPD initially continued to fight a lawsuit demanding it.
The day before a December hearing in the case, the NYPD sent the footage to the complainants, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, because, after 20 months, the department’s internal review was complete. That footage, which the law firm shared with me, showed that as officers converged on the scene where Trawick lay lifeless, two of them told a sergeant that “nobody” had been hurt. “Just a perp.”
Shortly after ProPublica published a story about that, a lawyer working on the case for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest got a phone call from the city agency that investigates police misconduct against civilians. An investigator at the Civilian Complaint Review Board had a favor to ask: Could the lawyer please share the newly released footage with him? The investigator explained that the NYPD wouldn’t provide footage to the CCRB.
“I was shocked to get that call,” said the lawyer, Benjamin Reed, of Milbank LLP. “It’s disturbing that they had to come to us, after we had to fight with the NYPD for a year to get it. It’s just backwards. It’s obvious that they can’t properly oversee the NYPD if they can’t get footage.”
That is part of a long pattern of the NYPD obstructing the work of the overmatched agencies that are supposed to oversee it. In shootings and other serious incidents such as the Trawick case, the NYPD routinely refuses to give the CCRB footage and other records until the department’s internal investigation is over, which can take a year or more.
The delays can render the civilian board’s investigations effectively moot. The CCRB told me that its investigation into Trawick’s killing is still open, and that it has now received footage from the NYPD. But the police commissioner, who gets final say on punishment, has already decided there was no wrongdoing.
When I reported on the Trawick case last fall, one of the people I spoke with was Jonathan Smith, who worked on civil rights litigation at the Justice Department during the Obama administration and led the agency’s most significant investigations into police abuse. “This case is a lesson in how you don’t do one of these encounters,” he said, after reviewing the footage. “They should teach it in the academy.”
I reached back out to Smith to share the NYPD’s conclusion that there was no wrongdoing. “For them to find nothing wrong there,” he said, “it’s just stunning.”
Smith said it reminded him of another young man’s death he recently investigated for the city of Aurora, Colorado. Twenty-three-year-old Elijah McClain died after police officers twice put him in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine. The officers had stopped him after a 911 caller said McClain, who was walking down the street, “looked sketchy.”
Like Trawick, McClain wasn’t doing anything criminal. As in the Trawick case, local prosecutors decided not to indict the officers. And as in the Trawick case, an internal police investigation cleared the officers. (The independent review that Smith led concluded that the investigation had been “cursory and summary at best.”)
It’s all part of a pattern, Smith said: “Every department I’ve seen where there’s been a pattern of misconduct, you’ve also had a broken accountability system.”
There was one other call I made after learning of the NYPD’s decision. It was to Kawaski Trawick’s mother, Ellen Trawick. She had not heard about the department’s ruling.
“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “He hadn’t committed a crime. He hadn’t harmed anyone. They came into his own home and took his life for no reason. For them not to see that’s wrong, that’s just heartbreaking.”
Trawick and her family have filed a lawsuit against the city, the NYPD and the officers.
In response to the family’s action, city lawyers have placed the blame for Kawaski Trawick’s death squarely on Kawaski Trawick. As they put it in a filing last fall: “Plaintiff(s)’ culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part, to his/her/their injuries and or damages.”But a suit can only do so much. If there’s a settlement or a judgment, it’s likely the city and its taxpayers, not the officers or the NYPD, that will pay.
I asked Ellen Trawick what outcome she is hoping for in the suit. “I want the officers held accountable for their actions,” she said. “They took Kawaski’s life. But from what you’re saying there’s nothing going to be done about it.”
Update, April 20, 2021: This story has been updated to reflect a jury’s conviction of Derek Chauvin.
Do you have information to share about police oversight in New York City? Contact eric.umansky@propublica.org. You can also reach him securely via Signal at 917-687-8406.
ALERT: Democrats Discussing Police Reform With Privileged Racism Denier
Andrew Stiles • April 29, 2021 4:38 pmA group of Democratic lawmakers met with Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) on Thursday to discuss police reform legislation in a direct rebuke to liberal pundits who recently denounced Scott as a lying, self-hating racism denier.
Sens. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) and Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) were among the Democrats who took part in the meeting, as was Rep. Karen Bass (D., Calif.), whom Biden considered picking as a running mate in 2020 because she lacked the ruthless ambition of Kamala Harris.
Scott was the subject of intense media scrutiny after giving the Republican response to President Joe Biden's congressional address on Wednesday. Scott's speech, which drew upon his personal struggles with racism and poverty, enraged professional journalists and other online liberals who were unable to contain their contempt for the successful black man.
MSNBC host Joy Reid said watching Scott's speech left her feeling "shocked and a bit embarrassed for him." Reid's colleague, Nicolle Wallace, said the speech was "delivered from a planet where facts don't matter." Washington Post reporter Eugene Scott suggested the senator had been speaking in code to an intended audience of white people, urging his Twitter followers to pay attention to the "demographics" of those praising Scott's speech.
Democratic analyst Jason Nichols, in a since-deleted tweet, called Scott a "clown" whose "ancestors are ashamed of him." At least one left-wing media personality had to apologize for "an ironic joke" using racially charged language. The term "Uncle Tim" started trending on Twitter.
Days earlier, Scott came under fire in the pages of the Post, which challenged his claim that his grandfather—who grew up in South Carolina during the Great Depression—lived a relatively unprivileged life.
Scott called out the Post‘s egregious fact check during his speech and criticized Democrats for refusing to work with him on police reform during the Trump administration. "My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution," he said. "But I'm still working, I'm hopeful that this will be different."
No comments:
Post a Comment