The Phoenix, Arizona, police officers who beat and tased Tyron McAlpin, a Black man who is deaf and has cerebral palsy, last year have been suspended without pay for 24 hours, and, predictably, the police department has convinced itself that the less than bare minimum disciplinary action sufficiently addresses the police brutality and racism.
According to the Guardian, the Phoenix Police Department’s interim police chief, Michael Sullivan, announced that he had issued 24-hour unpaid suspensions to the three officers who were involved in McAlpin’s arrest, which occurred after they responded to a call about a white man who was causing a disturbance. Sullivan also announced that two of the officers will also be required to attend de-escalation training.
As we previously reported, on Aug. 19, 2024, McAlpin was arrested after being accused of trying to steal a bike from a white man named Derek Stevens at a Circle-K gas station. The officers who responded to a call about a fight breaking out, Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue, were given a description of a white man who was identified as the aggressor, but Stevens pointed them towards McAlpin, saying he was the aggressor, and, apparently, that’s all they needed to hear.
From the Guardian:
Body camera footage showed the officers approaching McAlpin in a parking lot, where they ordered him to lie on the ground. In the police incident report, Harris wrote: “His hands raised to deliver targeted punches at my face/head, and multiple swings with closed fists at my head.” Harris also claimed that McAlpin had a “fighting stance with his legs planted for stability and force delivery” and that McAlpin “made it clear to me in the moment that he was not simply assaulting me in order to get away but engaging in assaults to cause me harm and injury.”
However, the body camera footage as well as additional surveillance camera footage showed Harris lunging out of his car first and charging towards McAlpin, who initially had his arms by his side. The body camera footage proceeds to show one of the officers saying “tase him,” and while McAlpin is pinned to the ground the officers stun him four times. The body camera footage also showed the officers punching McAlpin at least 10 times on the head and back.
So, Harris, Sue and a third officer identified as Jorge Acosta got 24-hour suspensions (and to be clear, they were suspended for 24 hours total, meaning if they work eight-hour shifts, they’re suspended for three days) because, according to the PPD, “The Department identified policy violations” following an administrative investigation into the arrest. One can only wonder if blatantly lying in a police report is included in those “policy violations” because, honestly, that never seems to be an offense that is taken seriously in a “justice” system where a cop’s word is far too often taken at face value.
Attorneys for McAlpin, who filed a $3.5 million notice of claim against the city and the three officers who were involved in his arrest, claimed last year that their client was punched in the head at least 10 times and tased four times before the officers wrapped their arms around his neck. So, we have cops using excessive force, lying on a police report and accosting a Black man based on the word of a white man who the 911 caller described as the aggressor — and all of that misconduct is supposedly rectified with a paltry 24-hour suspension without pay.
“We understand the concerns raised by this incident, and we take them seriously. The decision to suspend the officers reflects our commitment to accountability and maintaining public trust,” Sullivan said in a statement to 12News on Tuesday.
If a bare-minimum disciplinary action that doesn’t come close to appropriately punishing what should have been considered to be criminal actions on the part of the officers represents the PPD’s ideal of “commitment,” I’d hate to see what the department’s apathy looks like. Meanwhile, the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association is upset the officers were disciplined at all.
“We are appalled by the determination made by interim chief Sullivan to suspend the three officers involved in the McAlpin case. A situation that was previously reviewed internally by subject matter experts of the force evaluation and review unit and deemed to be within policy has suddenly been reversed due to public pressure, based on biased media reporting,” said PLEA President Darrell Kriplean.
You gotta love cop logic. The idea that any police department would throw its own officers under the bus “due to public pressure” is absurd enough, but Kriplean is out here whining about “biased media reporting,” while pretending there’s no bias at all at play when cops decide other cops did nothing wrong no matter how clear it is that they did do wrong. (And, again, in this case, the cops in question lied about what happened.)
Mind you, McAlpin was initially charged with felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest. Those charges were dropped last October after the case was reviewed by Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, according to NBC News. Curiously enough, McAlpin was never charged with the attempted theft of a bicycle. It’s almost as if cops went after a Black man based on the word of the white man who had been described as the aggressor, and then when that white man’s accusation turned out to be false, the cops decided to go ahead and charge the Black man with resisting an arrest that should never have happened in the first place.
SEE ALSO:
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3 Phoenix Cops Suspended After Attacking Deaf Black Man In Violent Arrest
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