If anyone else had hogtied, beaten, dropped on the ground, beaten again until dead, a man named David Sal Silva, there would be a swift response, resulting in the release of video evidence to the media, a perp walk and a press conference about how brave the officers were to take down the perpetrators. Anyone but their own deputies responding to an call about an intoxicated man.
The beating was horrible.
A half-dozen Kern County sheriff’s deputies were across the street beating a man with clubs and kicking him, she said. So she whipped out her mobile phone and began to video the episode, announcing to the officers what she was doing.For about eight minutes, Ms. Melendez said, the man screamed and cried for help. Then he went silent, she said, making only choking sounds.
Finally, having hogtied him, a number of witnesses said, two officers picked up the man and dropped him, twice. One deputy nudged the man with his foot. When he did not respond, they began CPR.
Two people reported to 911 what happened, and that they had recorded the beating. The cellphones containing the videos were seized by detectives before they had warrants. Then one of the videos disappeared. In the meantime, the officers present at the murder were returned to full duty.
After the horror of this murder and the “disappearance” of the video became the subject of national scrutiny, gears shifted and Kern County sheriff changed his story.
Sheriff Donny Youngblood also announced Tuesday that he asked the FBI to analyze two cellphones taken from witnesses who say they recorded the incident.
“I took the unprecedented step of asking the FBI to conduct a parallel investigation,” Youngblood told The Times. “Our credibility is at stake here.”
Youngblood said he has also placed the officers on paid administrative leave, a decision made in the last 48 hours, based on information they had received. He said he wanted to ensure the safety of the officers on the street.
The officers involved are Deputies Ryan Greer, Tanner Miller, Jeffrey Kelly, Luis Almanza, Brian Brock, David Stephens and Sgt. Douglas Sword.
Since, a surveillance video has emerged, but like most surveillance videos, it’s not particularly satisfying. The woman who had the video asked that her identity be kept a secret for fear of the reprisal. The video on the seized cellphone that remains has not been released, but one might suspect that it’s not nearly as damning as the video that has disappeared. And Sheriff Youngblood says “our credibility is at stake here.”
The isn’t a post about the horrific beating, murder, of David Sal Silva. This isn’t about the warrantless seizure of cellphones with videos of the murder. This isn’t about how the deputies were returned to duty rather than arrested, or how they are now on paid vacation while the investigation spins in circles. This is a post about salvaging credibility.
It appears that Sheriff Donny Youngblood, by calling in the FBI to figure out what happened with the disappeared video, thinks this is going to salvage credibility. After all, doesn’t it show that he isn’t concealing the evidence of his deputies having murdered a man? Hasn’t he opened his doors to another law enforcement agency, a credible agency, and by doing do shown that he is not engaged in a coverup?
What invariably comes from discrete incidents of outrage such as the murder of David Sal Silver, the taking of the videos, the disappearance of the videos, the restoration of the cops to the street and the reaction when the cops finally come to grips with the fact that the nation is watching, is a crisis management strategy that seeks to test how badly people want to not confront the terrible things that can happen.
When Youngblood seeks to salvage credibility, he’s not being forthright. What he’s really saying is he wants to see what it will take bring the public back to his side, to calm down, close their eyes and believe once again that the police are their friends. It’s not trust, but stopping the loss of credibility before trust is gone forever.
There is nothing the FBI can do now, even if we assume they can restore a deleted video, that will change the underlying culture of this Sheriff’s department that made seven deputies think they were entitled to kill a man, made someone else think they could make the evidence disappear, and made a sheriff think he could put them back on the street and no one could stop him. Even now, with the witness statements and the surveillance video, the best Youngblood can come up with is trying to salvage his credibility by asking the FBI to conduct a parallel investigation.
It’s not that David Sal Silva was the first man to end up needlessly dead on the street at the hands of law enforcement, or the first time officers roughly handled the citizens who had evidence of a crime, or the first time evidence of a murder by police mysteriously disappeared, or the first time the perpetrators of a crime were given their guns and shields back to protect and serve, or the first time they were later given paid vacations.
It’s also not the first time people read, saw, heard of all these things and let their minds play whatever games it needed to play to find a way not to confront the inescapable reality of the situation, that they were seeing the end result of a malignancy that existed and spread deep within the Kern County Sheriff’s Department.
Will the media or the public recognize that there was no credibility to be salvaged, but just another test of whether they are too fearful, too disconnected, too willing to pretend it isn’t what it is so they won’t have to confront how law enforcement got this out of control, this violent, this evil? If they fail the test, it won’t be the first time.
Update: The Kern County Sheriff has released the one video that didn’t get disappeared. It shows the second video being taken, the one that ceased to exist once the video came into his officer’s hands. See them at ExCop-LawStudent.
Update 2: Sheriff Youngblood announced the good news :
Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said Thursday that a man at the center of a videotaped altercation with deputies died from heart disease — not baton blows.
The county coroner’s office labeled David Sal Silva’s death accidental, adding that the primary cause of death was hypertensive heart disease.
Forget those blows. Forget the beating. Forget that he died in the midst of the beating according to what the video (that has yet to appear) showed. That was just background to his dying of heart disease, coincidentally while deputies were beating him.
And because that’s not sufficiently incredible and ridiculous, add this detail to the mix:
The deputy warned Silva he would release a police dog on him if he did not cooperate. When Silva continued to resist, the deputy remotely released the dog from his cruiser. The dog bit Silva several times and bit the handler deputy as well, Youngblood said. Silva grabbed the dog by the throat.
So as the dog was biting Silva, he “grabbed the dog by the throat,” which most people would say he held the dog back from further biting him. Most, but not Sheriff Youngblood.
Youngblood said Silva resisted deputies and tried to attack the dog.
That’s the dog version of “he attacked my fists with his face.” It seems that the effort to salvage credibility isn’t going well. Not well at all.
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It’s funny that no one has mentioned that the use of a search warrant to seize the cellphone videos is illegal under the Privacy Protection Act (42 USC 2000aa), given the fact that the lady told 911 that she was sending the video to the news.
And you’ve written a very interesting post on the issue, well worth reading.
They didn’t just seize the videos, of course. They seized the PHONES. Do we really expect they’ll keep their mitts off of everything else on those phones — texts, emails, call records, etc. — and just look at the videos?
People taking phone videos and pics these days really need to look into live-streaming that stuff to the cloud so they have a copy even if the phone is grabbed.
Most people aren’t dedicated to the cause of preserving videos from police. It’s unhealthy to think otherwise. As for the phones, you’re right, but that’s a different issue.
Correct, they seized the phones, but it was to get at the video.
The interesting part will be if the lawyers involved figure this out and go to court to get the video released.
You’re right on the live-streaming apps. I have a couple (Qik, Bambuster) on my phone.
Brett’s point is that smartphones, whether seized for video or any other reason, contain a wealth of personal data that nonetheless comes into police hands. Whether they look at it or not isn’t the point. The point is that they now have it and it’s available for their search if they choose to.
In line with the actual topic of the post, I am not really surprised that people are avoiding the real issues here. This isn’t something that can be handled with an easy, uncomplicated fix. People sense that dealing with such things effectively is going to require a radical change in their mind set, which is a darned uncomfortable thing. So they avoid the confrontation and fool themselves into thinking that some “investigation” and a few “reforms” will do the trick. Maybe throw in a little “oversight”. All done by someone else, of course, so John and Jane Citizen can go back to sleep as soon as they see the announcement that an investigation will be initiated that will lead to appropriate reforms.
<Applause>
No, I agree. That’s what I would have done (well, been directed to do) when I was still working as an officer.
I don’t think it is right, but that is how it works once you have it and a warrant.
The mind set of the officers won’t change. I was an officer for 20 years, and it wasn’t until I got out that I realized how pervasive the group-think is within a PD.
You can try and change the administration, bring in someone from outside, etc., but that doesn’t change the culture. The culture forms at the officer and sergeant level on the street, and in most departments they dislike (or even hate) the admin types.
You have to force a culture change from the outside, by civilian oversight that has real power. The chiefs will oppose this because it cuts into their power, while the officers and union will oppose it from a stand-point of self-preservation.
Unfortunately, few communities will push hard enough to effect real change. Until they do, we’ll continue to see David Silva and Kelly Thomas incidents.
This question of police culture is one that I’ve been discussing for a very long time here. Whether the culture can change from inside or out is the question. I don’t think it can be forced down cops’ throats, but it has to come from cops who don’t want to either do this or be party to this.
In fact, it’s been a point of contention with LEAP here, where we’re all best friends when it comes to the drug war, but when it comes to police misconduct, they look the other way.
The only way to change it is to force it down cops throats.
It’s hard to explain, but it is like a brotherhood/sisterhood. You go out every night with these guys and gals, and if it hits the fan, they are the ones you have to depend on to have your back. All cops know about either Frank Serpico (sp?) or someone like him. You don’t want to be him. It’s very similar to the military.
In the military, most of the troops care less about duty, patriotism, etc. They just don’t want to look bad in front of their other unit members. My dad was a combat vet and said that’s what kept him going. It’s what made me jump out of a plane when I desperately wanted to chicken out. S.L.A. Marshall wrote a good book on this, I believe it is called “Men Against Fire.” Police work is very similar, which is why you won’t be able to change the culture with other cops.
There is also a very big us v. them aspect. Kevin Gilmartin explains it much better than I can (Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement).
Finally, there is virtually no support system for officers following critical incidents. I’ve been shot at, had knifes pulled on me, been seconds away from shooting a suspect on multiple occasions, and not once did the police administration or the public care. You can’t go to counseling (remember the look bad) and the PD won’t force you to go (he doesn’t need it, he’s got it together).
You see people shot, stabbed, with their head bashed in, etc., and the only ones that you can talk to about it are other cops. You have regular nightmares – they even warn you about it in the academy now. Regular citizens don’t get it, not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t visualize it or comprehend it. You get more and more tied to that world, where the only friends you have are other cops.
I was in that world for over 20 years – and didn’t even see how dysfunctional some of it is.
I guess I’m done with the rant. I wish I were more eloquent and could describe it better, but the culture won’t change on its own.
I appreciate your discussion of your experiences. We’re pretty well aware of this, and much of it has been discussed here at various times. But the question is whether any outside influence can ever break through the Us v. Them barrier: will cops ever care what any outsider thinks, or will the attempt of outsiders to change the culture just stiffen their resistance?
From my experience and the cops I know well, my sense has always been that the change has to start internally, not because it’s likely to happen but because whenever any outside influence tries to force change down their throats, they circle the wagons and become more firmly convinced that no one but another cop can understand them.
What if the internal culture was really “protect and serve” instead of “protect ourselves”?
No, they won’t really care what the outsiders think, but it has to be forced on them. Cops didn’t voluntarily accept Miranda, and southern cops didn’t voluntarily accept integration. Both were forced on them, and they eventually adapted.
The question is whether the general public has the moxie to stick with it over the objections of police. A good example is New Orleans PD. Long considered a very corrupt PD, the federal government came in and demanded changes, which the city agreed to. Now they say it is too expensive to make the changes that will transform the PD.
Austin citizens got a fairly decent citizen review board, but then allowed the police union to gut it through their union contract. The city negotiators caved.
You won’t get to a protect and serve culture until you can force the change.
Notice how neither example actually changed anything? As far as I’m aware, no CCRB has ever been independent or effective.
“Police – n. armed force for protection and participation”
Exactly.
It needs to be more powerful. It should have its own investigators, subpoena power, access to all police records, etc.
It should be able to impose disciplinary action over the objection of the chief.
All of the models out there right now fail because they don’t have the power and are not truly independent.