Malaika Brooks was driving her 12-year-old son Jahrod to the African American Academy on Beacon Hill one morning in 2004 when a Seattle cop pulled her over. It was the beginning of a traffic infraction that has so far cost city taxpayers $345,000 in legal fees, and which left the then-pregnant Brooks with Taser scars and the determination to pursue an alleged police-brutality case for what appears to be a record seven years and counting.
Steven Miller
Joe Dyer
An angry protester faces an officer near Capitol Hill's East precinct on Feb. 18. The protester repeatedly hurled insults and challenged the officer to hurt him.
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Watch the videos referenced in this article:
Video of Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk shooting woodcarver John T. Williams.
Video of Martin Monetti being kicked in the head by SPD officer Shandy Cobane and told "I'm going to beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homey."
Video of Jake K. Baijot-Clary, arrested for assault outside a Ballard bar, when SPD officer Garth Haynes put a foot on Clary's head, bouncing his face off the sidewalk.
Video of violent arrest of burglar Daniel Saunders.
Video of Joey Wilson, mentally handicapped teen, who claims Seattle police beat him during a jaywalking stop.
Video of Seattle police officer punching woman during jaywalking stop.Related Content
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Officer Juan Ornelas, who'd caught Brooks on radar, came to her window and said she'd been doing 32 in a 20-mph school zone. Brooks denied it, explaining he must have mistaken her vehicle for the black Honda that had been racing along in front of her. Brooks, then 34, handed her license to Ornelas as her son got out and walked on to school. Ornelas wrote the ticket and handed it to Brooks for her signature. She declined. Signing it, she mistakenly thought, would be an admission of guilt. Ornelas told her that if she didn't sign the traffic ticket, he would issue a criminal citation for refusing. She could then be arrested and taken to jail.
Brooks said she wasn't signing anything, but would accept the ticket otherwise. Ornelas then called Sgt. Steve Daman to the scene. Officer Donald Jones also showed up. When Brooks told the sergeant she wouldn't sign, Daman told Ornelas and Jones to "book her." Brooks was asked to step from the car. She refused. Jones then displayed a Taser stun gun and asked if she knew what it could do to her. Brooks told the officers she was pregnant. "How pregnant?" one asked. Her baby was due in two months, she said. She refused to step out.
After a discussion among the officers, Ornelas opened the driver's door, reached in and grabbed Brooks by the left arm as Jones put the device to Brooks' thigh in touch-stun mode and shocked her with 50,000 volts. She began honking her horn, screaming for help as she resisted. Jones quickly administered another shock to Brooks' arm, and she stopped blowing the horn. Then he shocked her a third time, in the neck, and Brooks fell over, unable to move. She was pulled out and held face-down on the street while being handcuffed. After an examination by fire-department medics, she was jailed for resisting arrest. The charges ultimately were dismissed.
Brooks, who two months later gave birth to a healthy baby girl, has been in court ever since, contending that the police used excessive force. Her case worked its way up to a federal appeals panel last year, where two of three judges ruled that the police had acted within the law and used proper force. But after another appeal, Brooks' attorney Eric Zubel was allowed to appear before the full 11-member court at a session in Pasadena, Calif., in December to re-argue the case. A decision is due soon.
Ted Buck, of law firm Stafford Frey Cooper, which has been contracting with the city for 40 years to defend Seattle police officers in court, says Brooks was Tasered not because she was speeding, "but because she committed two separate crimes," resisting and refusing to sign the criminal citation.
"If the police had done their job right," counters Zubel, "this never would have happened."
This debate might have ended long ago with the presence of video footage. But there was none. Seattle police began to install dashboard cameras in 2002, equipping just 16 of 220 vehicles. They have been adding them since, and now 275 vehicles sport the $5,000 cameras. The city is also contemplating equipping each officer with a lapel camera. But the police cruiser in Brooks' case was not outfitted with video, nor were any security cameras or witnesses with video-capable cell-phone cameras nearby to catch police face-planting a pregnant woman. Imagine that on TV.
"The problems we are addressing today have been around for a long time," says Zubel, an attorney for 37 years. "Had there been videotape of her arrest, there would have been a much better chance of settling the case. Tape is probably the biggest difference in these cases today."
See a list of incidents here.
Seattle Police Officers' Guild President Rich O'Neill says that of the 1,250 officers in the Seattle Police Department, 85 percent have never had a complaint filed against them, and only five had three or more complaints leveled against them in 2009. Use-of-force incidents have declined three years in a row, he says, which SPD confirms, dropping Seattle's force use to 20 percent less than the national average.
But that doesn't seem to be the public's perception of Seattle cops today, and that may have a lot to do with videotape. Nine out of 12 use-of-force cases occurring from 2008 through 2010—most of them still under police or court review—include video taken by car and security cameras or witnesses. Most of the current high-profile cases likely wouldn't be known to the public had it not been for the video revolution.
One of the first 2010 videotape cases—footage that some SPD officials attempted to keep from being aired on local TV—shows a prone 21-year-old Martin Monetti being kicked in the head last April by SPD officer Shandy Cobane. He told Monetti— mistakenly detained as a robbery suspect—that if he moved, "I'm going to beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homey."
