Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 16, 1991 TAG: 9104160426
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long
The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star reported in a series of articles that began Sunday that lawyers and veteran police officers estimated that 200 or more people were beaten by police in the resort city last year.
Nevertheless, the newspaper said, of 234 people who appeared in city courts in 1990 on charges of resisting arrest, the most common charge against someone who has to be restrained, 105 were cleared.
The newspaper located 29 of those 105 people, and 25 of them said they had been subjected to police violence. The newspaper said most of those it contacted were average people with no criminal records.
Among the cases cited by the newspaper was that of Bill Martin, a Florida welder who had been living near the oceanfront since November 1989 and working at area shipyards.
Martin was stopped on Feb. 27, 1990, because of an illegally tinted windshield in his car. The windshield had been legal in Florida and Martin said he did not know it was illegal in Virginia.
Officer Frank D. Wins ordered Martin out of his car, grabbed him and pushed his face down on the trunk, Martin said. By that time, two other officers had arrived.
When he asked why he was being searched on a traffic stop, Martin said one of the officers said he was resisting. Martin was thrown into the gutter and his face was mashed into the concrete while he was handcuffed, he said.
Martin said his wife, who had been with him in the car, was asked about drugs and weapons and was told a computer check had showed her husband was a wanted man. Police searched the car but found only root-beer bottles under the seat. The computer check turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.
Martin said he was taken to a police station and held for five hours before being released and allowed to go a hospital, where he was treated for cuts and abrasions and a bruised kidney was discovered, apparently caused by an officer standing on his back when he was being restrained. "By the next morning, I was having trouble controlling my bladder," he said.
Wins and officer Raymond Mireles denied Martin's account of events. Both officers said Martin fell, pulling them down on top of him.
"He required no medical attention, nor did he ask for any," Wins said. "He started complaining of stomach problems. The only thing I noticed was the little scratch on his nose, and that happened during the fall."
Martin hired an attorney a few days later, former prosecutor Kathleen M. Edge. "I haven't ever had anybody come in to me on a traffic stop who was that beaten up," she said.
At his trial April 16, the judge ruled in Martin's favor on six charges. He was fined $25 for having a bald tire. Martin later filed a complaint with the police department's internal-affairs unit, but the officers were cleared of any wrongdoing.
Edge said some officers have developed reputations for escalating minor encounters into major confrontations.
"Police officers know who the bad officers are," said Larry Cardon, another lawyer. "They know who the guys are who have chips on their shoulders. And so do attorneys.
"Your client tells you one of those names and your natural instinct to side with the police gets turned around," Cardon said.
Some officers "are so predictable that all you have to do is see their names on your client's warrant and you know what happened before your client ever says a word," Edge said.
Larry B. Slipow, a former prosecutor and defense attorney with 18 years' experience, said most of the city's 630 officers do their jobs properly. When force is used, often the suspect is drunk or verbally abusive, he said.
But sometimes the violence is excessive. "You see some that are outright retribution, where the officer will beat the guy when he's down or even beat him when he's in handcuffs," Slipow said.
Of the 25 people who told the newspaper they were subjected to police violence, 17 said they were first approached over minor infractions, such as riding a bicycle on the sidewalk or urinating in a parking lot.
Of the 25, three had previous records and five were convicted of the original misdemeanor, although most of them eventually wound up facing more serious charges after the alleged beatings, usually resisting arrest. Nineteen were exonerated of all charges, the newspaper said.
"When a 130-pound college kid walks into court with a clean record and three or four misdemeanor charges against him, and the 250-pound officer tries to tell the judge this little guy assaulted him, it's not hard to figure out what's going on," Slipow said. "Most of the time, the kid walks."
Despite the violence pattern, the newspaper said, less than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against the police department in the past decade, and the city has paid only $168,000 to five victims of police violence since 1985.
As for citizen complaints, 124 misconduct complaints have been filed against officers in the past three years, police records show. Of those, 18 were deemed legitimate by the department.
by CNB