A Brutal Rodney King Style Beating at a Traffic Stop in Michigan

By Ryan Felton, Guardian UK

30 March 15

 

A video with echoes of the Rodney King beating shows Floyd Dent pinned to the ground and punched 16 times by an officer with a history of citizen complaints

loyd Dent never felt pain like he did the night of 28 January.

At about 10pm, the Detroit native says he went to visit a blind friend in the neighboring city of Inkster, to deliver a bottle of Rémy Martin and a 40oz of Bud Ice. He stayed for a few minutes, then left to drive home.

Moments later, a police cruiser behind him flipped on its overhead lights. According to a police report on the incident, Dent, 57, had failed to use a traffic signal and disregarded a stop sign. He continued to drive at roughly the same speed for about three-quarters of a mile, to a well-lit area where he says he felt comfortable. There, near an old police station, he pulled to the side of the road.

The police say Dent was driving with a suspended license. According to the office of Dent’s attorney, Greg Rohl, his driving record indicates the suspension was related to an unpaid driving ticket from several years ago.

Dent opened his door and put both his hands out of the window.

“I wanted to let them know I’m unarmed,” he told the Guardian.

But officer William Melendez – believing Dent was reaching for a gun – approached with firearm drawn. What happened next was captured on a patrol car camera.

No audio of the incident exists. According to Dent, one of the officers told him to “get out the car, before I blow your fucking head off”.

Dent opened his door and was dragged out of his Cadillac; almost immediately, Melendez put him in a chokehold. Melendez then proceeded to deliver 16 blows to Dent’s temple. This all took place in about 15 seconds. Another officer arrived moments later and proceeded to use a taser stun gun against Dent, three times. In the video, Dent, with blood dripping from his forehead and cheek, appears not to be resisting Melendez’s efforts to arrest him.

In the police report, Melendez contended that as he had approached Dent’s open car door, the 37-year veteran Ford employee, who had no criminal history, looked at him “with a blank stare as if on a form of narcotic” and plainly stated: “I’ll kill you.”

Dent says Melendez choked him so tightly he couldn’t breathe.

“At one point, I just gave up,” he said in an interview on Sunday at his attorney’s office. “I thought that was it for me.”

At a later hearing, Melendez testified that even before any traffic violation occurred, he planned to investigate Dent simply because he had stopped to visit someone in a part of Inkster known for problems with drugs.

Melendez, 46, claimed Dent was immediately combative and bit his forearm, though he would later testify there were no marks because he was wearing several layers of clothing. Dent denies the accusation. Melendez said the bite was enough reason to begin repeatedly punching Dent.

“I was afraid that I might contract something,” Melendez testified, earlier this month. “I needed to assure that Mr Dent would not do that again.”

For that, Dent says he spent two days in hospital for a fractured left orbital, blood on the brain and four broken ribs.

‘Not all cops are bad, just the ones I ran into’

Inkster, with a population of about 25,000, is 73% black. Melendez is Hispanic; the other eight officers who arrived to the scene on 28 January were white.

While Dent was sitting in the back seat of a cruiser, police say they found a small bag of cocaine underneath the passenger seat of his vehicle.

Dent, whose post-arrest drug test came up negative, says police planted that evidence. Rohl, Dent’s attorney, contends that a close review of a video released this week shows Melendez pulling a bag of drugs from his pocket.

“I saw [an officer] with drugs in his hand, and I thought, ‘Look at them dirty dogs,’” Dent said. “After that I just held my head down.”

Dent has two children, including a 30-year-old son who says he is now unsure if he wants to pursue his dream of being a Michigan state trooper.

“He told me, ‘If cops are like this, I don’t wanna be a state police officer’,” Dent said. “I told him not all cops are bad, just the ones I ran into.”

Hilton Napoleon, a former Inkster police chief, said the allegations levied by Dent came as no surprise.

Citizens told him during his three-year tenure that officers planted evidence at a crime scene, he said.

“I tried to get them to come forward and make an official complaint … but they’re scared,” said Napoleon, who resigned in 2014. “And rightfully so.”

Police departments across the US have “bad apples”, Napoleon said, but officers often fail to report their actions.

“People are up in arms, everywhere,” Napoleon, who is black, told the Guardian. “And they’re looking at the police with a jaundiced eye now.”

According to local activists, the incident involving Dent is just one among a number that have pointed to a larger problem of police brutality nationwide. Following the deaths last year of two unarmed African Americans, Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Missouri, protests have spread across the US.

In the wake of the video showing Dent’s beating, demonstrations took place in Inkster – where the police force is estimated to be 80% to 90% white.

Bishop Walter Starghill, president of the Western Wayne office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he immediately met officials in Inkster, seeking ways to engage the community and let residents know the incident involving Dent would not be “swept under a rug”.

“I was shocked,” Starghill told the Guardian, when asked what he thought of the video. “It wasn’t a pretty sight; it brought a lot of concern to see somebody to be actually treated that way.”

Starghill compared the clip to the infamous beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, saying it afforded the public an opportunity to witness what took place. King’s beating, captured on camera, sparked serious riots.

“We realize there’s two different kinds of justice,” Starghill said. “There’s American justice and then there’s black justice. And America says that you are innocent until proven guilty; in black America we feel we are guilty until we are proven innocent.”

Inkster’s police chief, Vicki Yost, who is white and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian, told other media outlets Melendez had been taken off street patrol. A criminal investigation by Michigan state police is under way, with no timeline for completion, said spokeswoman Shannon Banner.

“The investigation will include a review of all video evidence and interviews,” Banner told the Guardian. Its report will be forwarded to the county prosecutor’s office for review, she said.

The only person who has been prosecuted since the incident is Dent.

Initially, he faced charges of assault, resisting arrest and possession of cocaine. Upon viewing the patrol car video at a preliminary hearing earlier this month, a district court judge tossed out nearly all the charges. A court date on the drug charge is scheduled for Wednesday.

Regardless of this, said Rohl, the kind of treatment Dent received is unacceptable.

“I don’t care if he’s got a kilo of cocaine and two dead bodies in that car, I don’t give a shit,” he said. “It’s never appropriate ever to see that kind of brutality visited upon someone being arrested.”

In the case of Inkster, the question of a financial settlement with Dent comes at a difficult time for the city. Since 2012, Inkster has been under a consent agreement with the state of Michigan to address its dire financial problems. During Napoleon’s short stint as police chief, the number of officers in the department dropped from 73 to 24.

“You have a city that can barely keep its doors open, and now they’re gonna have to come up with a bunch of money and throw it on the backs of taxpayers,” he said.

‘RoboCop’

Melendez’s record shows he has faced similar allegations before. At one point, he garnered more citizen complaints than any officer in Detroit, where he started his career in 1993 and served until his resignation in 2009. He entered Inkster’s police force a year later.

Over nearly two decades, Melendez has been named as a defendant in a dozen federal lawsuits, accused of planting evidence, wrongfully killing unarmed civilians, falsifying police reports and conducting illegal arrests. Some suits were settled out of court. Others were dismissed.

In 1996, Melendez, who was known in Detroit as “RoboCop”, and his partner shot and killed Lou Adkins. While Adkins was on the ground, several witnesses said the officers shot him 11 times, according to the Detroit Free Press. The case was settled for $1.05m, court records show.

Later, in 2002, Melendez and a group of officers arrested Detroit resident Darrell Chancellor, a convicted felon, for possession of a firearm. Chancellor testified that he was sitting in a car with a group of friends when Melendez drove by with his partner. Chancellor and his friends exited the vehicle quickly “because it was RoboCop”, Chancellor testified.

Accounts of the incident between Chancellor and Melendez vary wildly. The officer claimed Chancellor threw a gun; Chancellor denied he had one. About 15 minutes later, according to Chancellor’s testimony, Melendez put a gun on top of the vehicle and said: “Chancellor, this is your gun.” Chancellor denied the accusation.

While Chancellor was being transferred to the police precinct, an argument broke out. Melendez, Chancellor said, told him to “shut the F up” or he would also plant drugs on him.

Chancellor spent 213 days in jail. When federal prosecutors reviewed the case, the firearm possession charge against him was dismissed.

The US prosecutor’s office examined Chancellor’s case as part of an investigation into allegations against Melendez, who was cited as the ringleader of numerous officers indicted by a federal grand jury in 2003 on civil rights violations. The officers were acquitted in 2004; jurors who spoke with the Detroit News explained they didn’t believe the government’s witnesses, many of whom had criminal records.

Around the time Chancellor’s case was concluded, in 2007, the city of Detroit settled another suit involving Melendez for $50,000. The lawsuit alleged Melendez and his partners knocked on Ernest Crutchfield III’s door in November 2003. When they received no response, they entered the premises without a search warrant and, in the kitchen, shot Crutchfield dead. According to the case, the officers planted a gun near his body before falsifying statements and lying under oath.

Between 1987 and 2004, more than 3,400 Detroit officers were named as defendants in a lawsuit, according to a 2005 city report on police settlements. By that time, court records indicate, Melendez had been sued nine times. Only 26 officers in Detroit had been involved in as many cases, the report stated.

Melendez, who could not be reached for comment, is currently named as a defendant in one case related to conduct in Inkster. In July 2011, he is alleged to have assaulted Deshawn Acklin, choking him until he lost consciousness. Acklin was using the bathroom at a friend’s house when Melendez and other officers arrived, on suspicion of an alleged shooter being inside.

Melendez – who would later contend Acklin resisted arrest – is alleged to have beaten Acklin until another officer said “that’s enough”. While being treated in hospital, Acklin testified that Melendez asked him how he liked his “wrestling moves” while he was choked. Melendez denies ever saying that.

Eventually, a court filing stated, Acklin “succumbed to the pain and lack of oxygen and passed out while defecating on himself”.

After he was treated at a hospital for a closed head injury, a left foot sprain and bleeding from his eyes, Acklin spent three days in custody, according to the case. He was never charged with a crime.

‘People can have a collective voice’

Dent says the video of his incident is a painful reminder of treatment he never expected to receive.

“My hope with him having the courage to step forward is that people who have not been heard can come and have a collective voice,” said Rohl.

A demonstration is scheduled for Wednesday – the day Dent will be back in court on the drug charge – at 4.30pm, outside Inkster police headquarters. Protesters also plan to convene on 3 April at the spot where Dent was pulled over, and then march to Inkster police headquarters.

Dent is a spiritual man. “Sometimes I just wanna be by myself and think, ‘Why did this have to happen to me?’” he said.

“But then again, I thought, the man upstairs wanted me to expose him.”