The cop shown in a controversial video throwing a handcuffed 15-year-old girl to the ground is remaining on patrol while police investigators review his actions.
The police department’s internal affairs office opened an investigation into the actions of the officer, Joshua Smereczynsky (pictured), after a citizen video went viral last Tuesday of his March 15 arrest of the 15-year-old girl, who was charged with third-degree assault, breach of peace, and carrying a dangerous weapon. (Read about the incident here.)
Smereczynsky, who became a New Haven cop in 2007 and came from North Branford, remains on the midnight patrol shift while the investigation continues.
His situation is a contrast to that of Najea Poindexter, another officer who is the subject of an internal affairs investigation. The department put Poindexter on desk duty after police arrested her boyfriend in her car allegedly carrying drugs.
Poindexter has since been barred from police headquarters, according to her union president, Louis Cavaliere Jr.
“She’s not allowed in the building unless she has permission from the chief or if a matter pertains to her,” Cavaliere said. “They didn’t want her in the building.” (Click here and here to read about Poindexter’s case.)
The decision to keep Smereczynsky on patrol drew criticism from the arrested girl’s mother as well as from public figures who have been critical of the officer’s actions as captured by the video.
“During that investigation, he should at least be on a desk job. He should not be riding around in a patrol car,” remarked Pastor Donald Morris of the Christian Community Commission.
“He should not be on the street,” agreed Valerie Boyd, the arrested teen’s mother. “For the safety of any child, there should be a protocol that anybody under investigation should be off the street.”
“Do we have two different police departments, or one? A police department for black officers and a police department for white officers?” asked state NAACP President Scot X Esdaile. (Poindexter, pictured, the cop on paid leave, is black.) “This is a question to the union, a question to the mayor, a question for the chief of police, and a question for the police commission. This trend is similar in major cities across America.”
Assistant Police Chief Al Vazquez, who oversees internal affairs, said he made the call to leave Smereczynsky on patrol. He did not make the decision on Poindexter; Chief Dean Esserman did. (Esserman could not be reached for comment.) Vazquez said the decision on whether to take an investigated officer off the street “depends on the circumstances of the case.”
Like other police officials, Vazquez declined to discuss any details of the case until completion of the investigation. Reached Monday, Police Commission President Anthony Dawson said, he, too, needs to defer comment until internal affairs issues a report. The department has asked the public to reserve judgment until the investigation’s completion. The video has sparked a week of passionate public debate in New Haven, with people interpreting the same event from starkly different perspectives. Some see police brutality against a handcuffed teenage girl in the video; others, an officer necessarily defending himself against a violent arrestee. Police have declined to release even routine bare-bones details, usually disclosed after arrests, about this case.
Central questions remain unanswered, including whether the girl had a knife in her hand during her arrest. Another officer is shown on the video waving a knife removed from the girl after Smereczynsky took her to the ground. Police have not said whether the girl had the knife in her hands during the encounter; her mother, Valerie Boyd, said the knife had been in her daughter’s handbag, and that she carried it for protection against an older girl who had been threatening her. Another answered question: Why police didn’t seek medical attention for the girl, who suffered swelling and cuts on her face and a fractured shoulder during the arrest. Her mother took her to the hospital for treatment after her release from 1 Union Ave.
Smereczynsky, who could not be reached for comment, was not the subject of a citizen complaint. The police opened an investigation on their own based on the video. The department is not at this point accusing him of wrongdoing. His fellow cops have expressed confidence that Smereczynsky will be found to have acted appropriately, according to his training, in the March 15 incident.
“Josh is going to be OK,” union President Cavaliere said Monday. “Josh is a very sharp officer. He’s very smart, well-liked,” without any prior controversial incidents on his record. (Click here and here to read about prior arrests he has helped make.) “Josh is agreeing — this is how we are trained. How else do people want us to handle people who are resisting arrest?
“The scene was a near-riot. I heard it on the radio: Two females in a fight. One of them has a knife. You arrive to a scene like that, there are 20 people fighting, moving tables, throwing things around.”
Cavaliere said he doesn’t know where the girl had the knife at the time of her arrest. But he said she was fighting off the officer while in handcuffs. “I know when I went through handcuffing [training], they always would tell us, ‘Just because you’re handcuffed, doesn’t make you defenseless. You can still cause harm. You can still hurt somebody. You can kick and punch.”
Valerie Boyd said that her daughter did not resist arrest, that she failed to answer questions promptly.
“We’re not promoting excessive force. We’re promoting people to stop resisting the police. When you’re told you’re under arrest and you have handcuffs, it’s time to listen to the officer,” Cavaliere said. “If you’re going to resist and struggle and possibly have a weapon on you, what are we supposed to do? How would you like an officer to respond to somebody who is swinging her elbows and kicking her feet? What do people expect us to do? How are we expected to handle a situation like this? It’s a near-riot mob scene. I felt the officer used a lot of restraint.”
The police department has in recent weeks trumpeted its “de-escalation” training. Two days before Officer Smereczynsky was caught on video throwing the 15-year-old girl to the ground, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article praising New Haven as an alternative to the policing found in cities like Ferguson, Missouri.
An earlier version of this story follows:
Cop-Slam Protest Planned; “Community Is Upset”
A still from the citizen video.
Supporters of the family whose 15-year-old daughter got slammed to the ground during an arrest plan to march on police headquarters Monday afternoon. Meanwhile, a video of the incident continues to spark public outrage with little word in response from the cops.
Activist Barbara Fair announced that a group will march from the Hill starting at 4:30 p.m. and hold the rally at 5:30 p.m. outside 1 Union Ave. She said demonstrators are demanding accountability for police actions during the March 15 arrest of the 15-year-old girl outside Buffalo Wild Wings on Church Street during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Click here to read about that incident.
“We can’t have police officers treating our children in that way, no matter what they did,” Fair (pictured) said Sunday.
Greater New Haven NAACP President Doris Dumas said she hopes to organize a forum at which both the community and the police can air concerns about the incident. “The community is upset,” Dumas said.
Video Disappears, Reappears
Click on this YouTube video to observe the arrest — assuming the video is still there.
The video, shot by a citizen nearby, was originally posted to YouTube. It went viral on Facebook. Local news sites published the video. WTNH aired it statewide. After the story remained in the news, the YouTube video’s embed function was disabled, and the video therefore vanished from the news sites. The New Haven Independent and the New Haven Register then published a separate citizen’s video of the encounter, shot from farther away and posted on YouTube. That video subsequently disappeared from YouTube (“removed by the user,” according to the page) and from the news sites. The original video’s embed function has since been turned back on.
After the original video went viral last Tuesday, the police announced they would launch an internal investigation into the officer’s actions in response. Actually, the police didn’t announce it; the mayor’s spokesman did, in a one-paragraph release with no details about the incident. Police have refused to release any information about the incident pending the investigation’s outcome or to answer any questions about it.
The girl’s mother, Valerie Boyd, said police charged her daughter with carrying a dangerous weapon, third-degree assault, breach of peace, and interfering with an officer. She said the police took her to the police station to book her rather than to the hospital, despite her obvious injuries. After her release from 1 Union Ave., Boyd said, she brought her daughter to the hospital to be treated for a fractured shoulder and cuts to her face suffered in the encounter with the officer. Her arm was put in a sling.
The girl appeared Friday in juvenile court and received probation and restrictions on social-media use, as well as a prohibition against entering Buffalo Wild Wings, according to Boyd.
Boyd said an 18-year-old girl had attacked her daughter inside Buffalo Wild Wings. Someone sprayed Mace, the alleged attacker left, and cops came and arrested Boyd’s daughter. Boyd said her daughter was brought outside and did not resist arrest, but was thrown to the ground when she failed to answer questions promptly.
The video shows other officers appearing quickly on the scene after the first officer slammed the girl to the ground and subdued her. The video also shows one of the officers retrieving from the girl what’s believed to be a knife, and displaying it. Boyd said her daughter carried the knife in her bag out of fear of attack from the 18-year-old girl, who had been threatening her since last year.
That’s one side of the story. The police have yet to tell theirs.
PD In Bunker Mode
Paul Bass Photo
A Hill activist, Miguel Pittman (pictured), last Thursday asked police at the weekly Compstat data-sharing session why the public hasn’t received any information about the incident.
Assistant Chief Archie Generoso replied that the police want to complete their internal investigation first. He noted that the police opened the investigation themselves based on the video, without receiving a formal complaint.
“We ask everyone to reserve their opinions until we complete our investigation,” Generoso said. “It will be a thorough investigation into the incident. We will be completely transparent when our investigation is completed.”
Pittman thanked Generoso for the response.
Police Chief Dean Esserman was out of the country when the video emerged last week.
Mayor Toni Harp, who said she has seen the video, seconded the call to suspend judgment pending the outcome of the investigation. “It’s fair for everybody to wait and get the facts,” Harp said.
Esdaile: “She could have died.”
New Haven police routinely withhold most information about incidents under internal investigation until all the facts are in. The facts sometimes come out worse for the police than originally expected — as in the case of a former assistant chief who left the force after an internal review found he had ordered an officer to destroy evidence from a cell-phone video seized from a citizen. Sometimes the investigations show the cops acted properly and there was more to the story than was immediately apparent to the public.
Part of the reason for withholding key facts is to protect the arrestee — by refraining from dribbling out allegations that may tarnish her or his reputation, then prove untrue.
However, the police do routinely issue press releases with basic facts about arrests — what the charges were, when the arrests occurred, the name of participating officers. They do that even for cases in which investigations are ongoing, except when they choose not to, particularly when their actions have come under scrutiny — as they did in the case of a Yale professor who died in police lock-up in November 2013. For four days after the professor’s death, the police refused to acknowledge that they had even arrested the man, let alone that he died. They finally issued a release when the Independent published a story about it after confirming the information with the state judicial department, which was investigating the incident. (The city police investigated that incident, too. That was a instance in which internal investigations revealed no improper conduct by police, or by judicial marshals.)
The New Haven police have put together numerous releases and press events in recent months to trumpet their transparency and de-escalation approach to conflict as a contrast to the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, N.Y. Two days before the incident outside Buffalo Wild Wings, the Wall Street Journal held up New Haven’s approach as a positive alternative to Ferguson’s.
The department’s public information officer has failed to respond to repeated requests for comment, or to answer phone calls or email messages, since the video came to the department’s attention Tuesday.
When the police do choose to answer questions about this case, the questions will include:
• Was the girl in handcuffs at the time the officer threw her to the ground?
• How was she allegedly resisting arrest?
• Was she holding the alleged knife at the time, or was it in her bag?
• Why didn’t she receive medical attention?
• Who was the officer? How long has he been on the force?
• Was he following department protocol?
• Does the department train its cops to pursue alternative methods in cases like this one in order to de-escalate encounters?
• Was the other young woman involved in the Buffalo Wings incident arrested? Why or why not?
Ann Boyd, the arrested teen’s grandmother and a longtime Hill activist, called for protesters to keep it peaceful at Monday’s march and to avoid provoking the police.
“It’s not a race-card thing,” Boyd said.
The Greater New Haven NAACP hopes to organize a separate “solution-driven” forum soon, at which both the community and the police can talk out the issues raised by this incident, said Dumas, the chapter president (pictured).
Dumas has been working with top cops in the wake of Ferguson to build a relationship between NAACP members, especially youth members, and the police.
“We’ve been moving in the direction of improving the relationship. I don’t want it to fall apart,” Dumas said Sunday. She said the police need time to investigate the incident fully. But she said the community also needs “to have an outlet” to express its concerns over the video, and it needs to hear from the police. “It did not look good in the video,” Dumas said.
The officer “should have been able to handle a 15-year-old girl without slamming her into the ground. If the ice wasn’t there, her temple could have hit the curb and she could have died,” said state NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile.
“I would never want my daughter handled that way. I wonder if they handle young girls form Yale that way.”
In case the citizen video disappears from view again, here’s a grainier version shot from a computer screen.
Previous coverage of this story:
• Video Captures Cop Slam