North Braddock investigates Taser complaint

[warpedskydiver 0]

North Braddock investigates Taser complaint
Thursday, September 13, 2007
By Karamagi Rujumba, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
www.pittsburghpostgazette.com/pg/07256/816957-56.stm

John Bacharach's office has been flooded with phone calls since Shawn Hicks started telling his story in public -- how two North Braddock police officers, alerted by a silent security alarm, entered his home in the wee hours of July 28 and Tasered him out of a deep sleep.

"All my calls have been about this," Mr. Bacharach, North Braddock's solicitor, said on Tuesday. There is an ongoing investigation into the matter, he added, saying that the borough has asked the Allegheny County District Attorney's office to look into it.

"The officer who used the Taser has been put on desk duty and appropriate action will be taken, depending on the outcome of the investigation," Mr. Bacharach said.

What seems to be unravelling as a public relations nightmare for Mr. Bacharach and North Braddock officials, started as more than a nightmare for Mr. Hicks, 29, deep in a Friday night slumber after "a night out with my friends."

A Point Park University student and an office manager at the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania, Mr. Hicks is still grappling with what transpired in the early hours of that Saturday morning.

The disbelief of it all, he said, lingers: Two officers standing over him in his living room, shocking him with punishing rounds of Taser shots; sounds of boots and voices stomping through his four-story house yelling, "clear,"; him yelling at them to check his ID, which they did; more Taser shots; being handcuffed in front of his mother, daughter, and niece; and then dragged off to a jail cell for about three hours.

"If I didn't go through it," he said, "I wouldn't believe it."

A father of two girls, Kishawna, 11, and Shawnte, 7, both of whom live with him in the two-bedroom house he has lived in for six years, Mr. Hicks said on Monday that in addition to an apology from the officers who confronted him, he would like North Braddock to "take care of my hospital bills and compensate me for the pain and suffering I went through."

So far, none of that has happened. In fact, he and his family, he said, have received no response to a complaint letter he sent to North Braddock's mayor, solicitor, and police chief. North Braddock police officers directed all media inquiries to the borough solicitor. Mayor Raymond McDonough did not return repeated calls for comment.

But for Arlene Hicks, it will take more than an apology and payment of the more than $300 her son incurred in treatment costs for his back wounds to overcome "the pain of it all."

"What do I tell our granddaughters? How do I explain to them that their father has been arrested for nothing," said Mrs. Hicks, 55, a North Braddock native who moved with her husband, Nathaniel, 34 years ago to Penn Hills, where they raised five children.

She recalled that she arrived at the scene that Saturday morning in much the same way as the police because her son's security alarm company called her about the alarm going off at his Stokes Avenue house.

On that night, Mr. Hicks' daughter, Kishawna, was with her grandmother. Shawnte was spending that night at her mother's house. And so Mrs. Hicks, Kishawna, and another granddaughter, Arianna, 10, drove to check on the two-bedroom house at 528 Stokes Ave.

"When we got there, we found at least six police cars and then I saw my son seated on the porch. My heart felt lighter because I could see he was OK. But when we got closer, I saw that he was in handcuffs and I wanted to know what was going on."

Mindful that her son's history with Braddock police, and other police departments in the area, Mrs. Hicks said she was unnerved by the response she got from the officers.

"They told me they were taking him to North Braddock police station, and then Braddock, and then they told me that because he was an adult, they didn't have to tell me anything," she said.

On that July morning, Mrs. Hicks, confused and angry, said she felt enraged by the same "small mentality" of North Braddock police officers, whom she and her husband first confronted 13 years ago.

"They followed [Shawn Hicks] through three stop sign intersections as he was driving from Penn Hills to North Braddock and gave him a ticket. They told him to never come back to North Braddock. We went to court on that and won," she said.

But Mr. Hicks also has a police record that dates back to 1996, when Rankin Police charged him with carrying a gun without a license, receiving stolen property, furnishing alcohol to minors and possession of marijuana. All charges in that case were dismissed except for the marijuana possession.

In addition, Mr. Hicks pleaded guilty to assault and possession of marijuana charges in Penn Hills, once in May and again in June of 1997; guilty on a 2003 DUI charge in North Braddock, and guilty on a 2005 DUI charge in Swissvale when he was found with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.

Notwithstanding his police record, Mr. Hicks insisted that he had no interaction with North Braddock police officers on that July morning after a night when he had "a few drinks with some friends," until he felt the Taser shock.

"I came home and locked the door and went to sleep on the couch. [North Braddock police officers] woke me up with their Tasers," said Mr. Hicks, who contends the police forced their way into his home.

A respiratory therapist at Jefferson Regional Medical Center, Mrs. Hicks said she was especially angered when her son told her and her husband that he had been shot several times by a Taser.

"It angers me," she said. "It really angers me that they Tasered him. They had no way of knowing what was going on with him when he was asleep or why they couldn't wake him. And then they continued to shoot him with that thing even after they knew who he was. I know what electricity can do to a beating heart. They could have killed him."

And that, Mrs. Hicks said, is why her family will not settle for anything less than "North Braddock realizing that they need to train their officers better. They have to have some sensitivity training on how to handle people. I had to explain to my granddaughters that night that not all police officers behave like that."

The Hicks family, her son said, is meeting with an attorney this week "to consider our options here."

On that point, however, there are no gray areas for Mrs. Hicks.

"My feeling is that we should sue them. Whether we win doesn't matter," she said. "Money or no money is not the point. It's the principle. They need to understand that police officers ought to behave better than this."
First published on September 13, 2007 at 5:29 am

[skycop 0]

These guys definitely need some "sensitivity" training.
There is probably a little more to this that the media is leaving out or don't know.
One thing for sure, it is a public relations nightmare.

"Just 'cause I'm simple, don't mean I'm stewpid!"