Police Brutality: Three Officers Beat Female

[decim]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJMWQ93fKgU

Police Brutality: PEKIN Three Tazewell County jailers accused of using excessive force against a female inmate last fall have been absolved of the administrative charges against them and ordered reinstated with back pay.

But Tazewell County Sheriff Bob Huston said Tuesday that he will fight that ruling in circuit court in an attempt to have correctional officers Jeffrey Bieber and Justin Piro and Sgt. Richard Johnston permanently removed from their positions at the jail.

All three have been on administrative leave since October, when Becky Behm was brought to the jail after her arrest on drunken driving charges in Creve Coeur shortly after midnight Oct. 17.

By 5:30 a.m., she had been swung into a concrete wall head-first by Piro, punched in the face by Bieber and pepper sprayed on Johnston's order.

The incidents have been the subject of hearings before the Tazewell County Sheriff's Merit Commission since late last year, though those hearings didn't begin in earnest until May. Huston wanted the commission to allow him to terminate the jailers.

Attorneys for the officers were scheduled to begin presenting evidence for their clients Tuesday morning, but instead asked the commission to make a direct finding of not guilty and reinstate the jailers to their jobs with back pay.

The commission unanimously agreed.

"I felt after the prosecution was done that they didn't prove their case - any of it," commissioner Harvey Richmond said. "We all felt - what we saw in (the video), she would not do anything that they told her - they used only the minimal force that was needed to control her."

Richmond, a former deputy, said the commission didn't need to hear testimony presented by the officers' attorneys to find them innocent of the charges leveled against them by the sheriff because of Behm's behavior.

"If she at any time would have complied, she would have been out of there in half an hour," Richmond said. "If I would have seen something that I think was way out of line with the situation, I would have gone the other way, but I didn't see it."

Richmond said the 30-minute portion of the video shown during Behm's testimony in May needed to be examined very closely and in the context of the several hours before that footage to better understand the situation officers were trying to control.

But Huston maintained Tuesday that the 30-minute segment, which he released to media outlets after the ruling, was enough to justify the officers' termination. In the first couple of days after the incident, he called it the worst case of unnecessary force he'd seen in a decade as sheriff.

"I can not understand how anyone can watch the video of that incident and just let them all go," Huston said after the ruling Tuesday. "I believe that officers should be held to a high standard of conduct, but not to impossible or unattainable standards. Today, the merit commission refused to hold them to even the lowest standards of conduct or even to basic human dignity."

Attorneys for the jailers couldn't immediately be reached for comment later Tuesday.

Behm, who testified before the commission in May, said she couldn't recall most of the night at the jail and had no specific recollection of the beatings in a segregation cell in the A-block of the jail.

She said she had drank four or five beers at Behmer's Dugout, the Peoria bar she owns, over the course of about five hours before her arrest by a Creve Coeur police sergeant on suspicion of drunken driving.

Piro and Bieber claimed in their testimony before the commission that Behm was extremely intoxicated and belligerent and had to be transferred to the segregation cell to maintain order in the usual holding area.

Piro eventually swung Behm head-first into a concrete wall but testified that he was attempting to execute a sanctioned "takedown" technique and lost his balance. Bieber punched Behm in the face, but he claimed she attempted to leave the cell and lunged at him.

The merit commission's rejection of Huston's charges is the second such outcome for a high-profile Tazewell County case. The commission in December vetoed Huston's request to fire Deputy Jeff Bass for neglecting his duties and intimidating his superiors, though Bass was found guilty of those offenses.

Huston said he will appeal Tuesday's decision because he believes he was denied a fair hearing and the result was contrary to the evidence.

[mynameis]

From the same area division...She needs a civil rights attorney. There is no reason given for those jailers to have entered the cell.

Beyond that this is bothersome on a variety of fronts.

First, while you want an independent Merit Commission, this makes two big, back-to-back decisions from this one that are quite suspect.

Last December the commission found deputy Jeff Bass, a self-described "curable cancer," guilty of working at his own businesses while on the company clock, parking his squad car at some barn and "reading a math book" for a class while on duty, leaving the county when he was supposed to be patrolling it, disobeying direct orders from superiors and then trying to intimidate them into silence, only to reinstate him. Again, it begs the question: What's it take to lose your job in Tazewell County?

Second, we couldn't help but notice the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police chastising Huston for releasing the video to the media "to slander his own employees and mislead the public." Say what? If these officers did nothing wrong or to be ashamed of, then how is this "slander"? You'd think they'd welcome the chance to exonerate themselves with this slam-dunk evidence. The FOP did neither these officers nor its own reputation any favors with its comments.

Third, something of a disturbing pattern has developed at the Tazewell County Jail over the last decade. Four other current or former Tazewell jailers are under felony indictment for their alleged role in the 2006 beating of Charles Chandler as he was handcuffed naked to a bed, resulting in the breaking of his jaw and multiple ribs. The County Board authorized an out-of-court settlement to Chandler of $440,000.

In 2007 the county paid $100,000 to settle a sexual harassment suit filed by a former inmate who claimed another jailer made her perform sexual acts on him in 2005. He resigned after pleading guilty to official misconduct, though not to that specific allegation. In 1998, Stephen Carson committed suicide at the jail, his body undiscovered for 12 hours as six correctional officers who were supposed to be monitoring him reportedly watched a movie instead. Later they falsified jail logs in an attempt to cover their tracks. Interestingly, it's not just the same names that pop up every time.

Huston defends his department - the jail has 5,000 bookings a year with few problems, those that do happen often are reported by other employees, some of this can be attributed to very long hours and high-stress conditions, they take their share of abuse from nasty inmates - but he'll forgive those who start to connect the dots and wonder about the culture there, even if it's one he's trying to correct. These officers had to know they were being taped, but did it anyway. It looks bad.

Finally, all of this is expensive for taxpayers. There have been federal lawsuits; Behm's is one. The county's liability insurance deductible is $250,000. The legal fees add up, even when the county is not in the wrong. County Board Chairman David Zimmerman has noticed and is concerned. "We're the ones having to write the checks," he said. "There may be some problems with the Merit Commission, too."

Jails in central Illinois may not be of the mythical Mayberry variety, but they shouldn't be Abu Ghraib, either. That's hyperbole, of course, but citizens and taxpayers should believe their eyes here. This crossed the line.

http://www.pjstar.com/opinions/x2047450478/Our-View-No-excuse-for-Tazewell-jail-brutality

[mayorofcydonia]

Everyone keeps talking about FEMA camps, but there's already enough prisons and brutality in them and this doesn't get enough attention.

[tien an]

"Tazewell"?

Is that place for real?

tian an.