Victim of a "rough ride"?
The
Baltimore Sun has a pretty illuminating piece on the Baltimore Police Department's criminal technique of "rough rides" in police vans. It turns out that Baltimore citizens have been suing and settling with the city over police van rides and injuries sustained—
for years.
Relatives of Dondi Johnson Sr., who was left a paraplegic after a 2005 police van ride, won a $7.4 million verdict against police officers. A year earlier, Jeffrey Alston was awarded $39 million by a jury after he became paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a van ride. Others have also received payouts after filing lawsuits. [...]
Christine Abbott, a 27-year-old assistant librarian at the Johns Hopkins University, is suing city officers in federal court, alleging that she got such a ride in 2012. According to the suit, officers cuffed Abbott's hands behind her back, threw her into a police van, left her unbuckled and "maniacally drove" her to the Northern District police station, "tossing [her] around the interior of the police van." [...]
The most sensational case in Baltimore involved Johnson, a 43-year-old plumber who was arrested for public urination. He was handcuffed and placed in a transport van in good health. He emerged a quadriplegic.
The "unsanctioned" technique involves having a handcuffed person left to be flung around, with no securing seat belts or straps, while the driver of the van purposely creates a rough ride—breaking hard, hard fast turns, accelerating quickly.
In 1997, Alston became paralyzed from the neck down in a van after being arrested. Alston said he told the officers he couldn't breathe, but they refused to give him an inhaler for asthma.
Officers said the 32-year-old repeatedly rammed his head into the side of the van, freed himself from a seat belt and thrashed some more.
Alston sued, and at the trial, Dr. Adrian Barbul, a Sinai Hospital trauma surgeon, testified that Alston had no external head injuries when he was taken to the emergency room.
Alston won $39 million dollars that was settled down to $6 million. The settlements usually allow the city to say they didn't do anything wrong and the offending officers to walk away free from any sanctioning. Illegal police techniques aren't new, and using hands-free methods of inflicting physical punishment on those in custody has been around for decades.
University of South Carolina professor Geoffrey Alpert, an expert in police force, said rough rides are also known as "screen tests." When police cars or vans had screens between the front and back seats, drivers would stop short — "to avoid a dog" — sending a handcuffed prisoner flying face-first into the screen, he said.
"Cops used to laugh about it. That was big in the 1980s and 1990s," Alpert said. "It was obviously against policy and illegal. I remember in some trainings that police chiefs would say, 'You'd better bring the damn dog you were trying to avoid if you come in with a prisoner with such an injury.'"
We don't know exactly what happened to Freddie Gray inside of that van. We know he went in breathing and talking and came out in dire need of something more than emergency surgery could provide him or his family.