Video shows Seattle cop threatening handcuffed man in cell
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SEATTLE -- City prosecutors are investigating a Seattle police officer captured on tape threatening a handcuffed man in a holding cell.
The man had just been arrested in a street disturbance when Seattle Police Officer Clayton Powell walked into the holding cell and faked a punch. A camera captured the officer lunging forward, pulling back his arm, holding up his fist like he's about to strike, then walking out.
The footage is now part of a criminal investigation against the officer.
"I would never say that police should not be using force," said Chris Stearns, who chairs the Seattle Human Rights Commission. Sterns believes the man in the holding cell had his rights violated.
"The human right here that is at stake is the human right to safety," he said.
The incident started in the New Holly neighborhood when someone reported a drive-by pellet gun attack. Officers arrived to investigate, and a large crowd gathered around them.
A cell phone video captured Powell in a heated argument with someone from the crowd. At one point, a man spits on Powell who then shoves him.
Investigators believe Powell may have assaulted the man later, though it was not captured on tape. That man is the same man seen handcuffed in the newly-released holding cell video. Seattle police say they handed over the evidence months ago to the city attorney as part of an assault investigation into Powell's actions.
Powell's personnel file shows he failed his field tests three times in the police academy, raising red flags from the get-go among his trainers.
"This case, what it really represents is how much more we have to go," said Sterns.
Powell has been working in a non-patrol capacity while this case is pending. No criminal charges were filed against the man in the holding cell.
The man had just been arrested in a street disturbance when Seattle Police Officer Clayton Powell walked into the holding cell and faked a punch. A camera captured the officer lunging forward, pulling back his arm, holding up his fist like he's about to strike, then walking out.
The footage is now part of a criminal investigation against the officer.
"I would never say that police should not be using force," said Chris Stearns, who chairs the Seattle Human Rights Commission. Sterns believes the man in the holding cell had his rights violated.
"The human right here that is at stake is the human right to safety," he said.
The incident started in the New Holly neighborhood when someone reported a drive-by pellet gun attack. Officers arrived to investigate, and a large crowd gathered around them.
A cell phone video captured Powell in a heated argument with someone from the crowd. At one point, a man spits on Powell who then shoves him.
Investigators believe Powell may have assaulted the man later, though it was not captured on tape. That man is the same man seen handcuffed in the newly-released holding cell video. Seattle police say they handed over the evidence months ago to the city attorney as part of an assault investigation into Powell's actions.
Powell's personnel file shows he failed his field tests three times in the police academy, raising red flags from the get-go among his trainers.
"This case, what it really represents is how much more we have to go," said Sterns.
Powell has been working in a non-patrol capacity while this case is pending. No criminal charges were filed against the man in the holding cell.
Snohomish Sheriff's Dept. still employ officer in a training position after he would not allow two women to cover themselves after being arrested for skinny dipping at night. They were paraded at the police station and later won a law suit against them. Yet, the officer is TRAINING others?Â
looks like affirmative action at its finest. Failed field test at the academy ?  Three times ?Â
 @Maynard G Krebbs And you know this how?
A threat ??? O Palease......A parent does that quite often...
I'm still waiting on komo to find a real live actual victim. A victim who was polite and still got "ruffed" up. Not a "victim" with a long criminal record or who refused to comply with the most basic instruction.Â
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Hmmm...Probably a tall order. How about an actual well balanced story that actually shows the whole video along with all of the facts. Not just some quote from an ambulance chasing lawyer who's late with his Mercedes payment and wanting to score.
We forgive criminals all the time in this city, why can't we forgive a hard working officer who risks his life and dignity helping others?Â
 @Sam Maley You mean those fine folks that we pay to uphold the law while they violate it?
Let God forgive em.
@T_BONE_WALKER @Sam Maley You must have been T-boned...
This works too...
http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/Oy3J-tnIIQk&hl=en_US&fs=1&
 @Biggg Donnn That gets it over with too quick for these scum.
 @T_BONE_WALKER Think Tuba Man & Munch Bar...
 @T_BONE_WALKER  @Sam Maley The NDAA passage signed the death warrant of freedom for our country.
@T_BONE_WALKER @Sam Maley
a threat is criminal behavior ???? Get a life....
@Sam Maley I am sure T-Bone and the Constitution would disagree with you. You see, merely being arrested does not mean you are guilty of anything.  Remember you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Discipline and punnishment cannot be given until that proof has been provided and a court of law has affirmed it. And even in that case the police are not to mete out discipline or punishment. What you are suggesting harkens back to the Third Reich, Banana Republics, and areas once behind the Iron Curtain.
My point is this POS deserves to be disciplined. If the police did this to a decent human being I would feel the same way you do.
 @Sam Maley "Police violence is small percentage of the violence in this city."
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But its often 100% of the violence innocent victims endure in their entire lives. Police work was not always a matter of everyone is guilty as suspected, there are regular law abiding citizens getting caught up in these out of control episodes of unlawful behavior.
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The true crazy comes out in you when you accept criminal behavior against law abiding citizens as somehow reducing crime.Â
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 @T_BONE_WALKER  @Sam Maley Wow the true crazy in you just came out. What police violence? Police violence is small percentage of the violence in this city. You have your sights set in the wrong direction.Â
 @Sam Maley The violence they inflict on innocent citizens everyday through threats, intimidation, coercion, beatings, shootings, murders, that unlawful violence.
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We are guaranteed the right to life without threats and intimidation from anyone under US law and this country's founding documents specifically pointed to exactly what we are looking at time and again with the SPD.
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If you want to politicize this and blame "Seattle Liberal pansies", I suggest you blame them for not standing up for their rights before threats, coercion, and intimidation became the norm and lead to beatings and murder ultimately. True "Liberals" would have long ago taken action against these criminals.
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 @T_BONE_WALKER  @Sam Maley What unlawful violence? The perceived violence...Â
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 @Sam Maley Yeah and the right wing fascist jack booted thug gets a hall pass from unlawful violence? You Idiot!
 @Biggg Donnn  @T_BONE_WALKER Seattle Liberal pansies only give a hall pass to criminals. I'm purposing new legislation to hold all these people responsible for the crimes of the repeat offenders.
There exist other methods...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/saudi-arabias-beheading-nanny-strict-procedures/story?id=18182757
We as citizens should unite and start randomly begin rounding them up, binding their hands together and beat hell out of them for a few days at a time while "detaining" them in a basement somewhere. Maybe get a couple of their children and other family members in on the fun to let em know what its like to have loved ones attacked and tortured. Animals should be treated like animals.
 @T_BONE_WALKER Who exactly are we beating up?Â
Don't worry, you don't need guns... you can trust the police to protect you.
We are better than this. We as a community deserve more.
 @Harrison Deserve's more officers like this. This community obviously raises a bunch of dirtbags. We need to start holding parents responsible for their lack of parental guidance.Â
 @Sam Maley Yeah, you're right. We should screen the parents of all SPD applicants.
Great job Seattle P.D., keep up the good work and thank you for doing a job that most of your critics would never do, yet they love to sit in front of their computer and judge your every action. Â Hey critics.......If you don't like what you see then go through the academy and show everyone how to be a perfect law enforcement officer. Â
 @pacnorthwest Yeah, tell 'em how thankful you are that they're beating up people so you don't feel obligated to do that yourself...
 @JLS1950  @pacnorthwest  JLS  they do it to defend everyone including yourself even though you hate all of SPD
 @pacnorthwest  @lakeunion Nope... nobody in the NFL - and I frankly could not critique a football game in any intelligent manner whatever, nor would I try. But you know what? I have never "walked a mile in the[] shoes" of a bank robber, a murderer, a rapist, a mugger or a multimillionaire tax cheat, either - but I still think they all deserve appropriate punishment from the legal system.
 @JLS1950  @lakeunion OOOOHHHHH, the old "I have friends and family on the force" line, as if this somehow entitles you to judge as if you have ever walked a mile in their shoes.  You didn't mention that you were on the force so I assume you have not stepped up to the challenge.  I am sure you have a lot of good advice to both the Denver Broncos and the Green Bay Packers about what they should have done differently today as well.  Let me guess,  you have friends and family in the NFL?????Â
 @lakeunion  @pacnorthwest I don't hate all SPD - I have friends on the force and my grandfather was on the force. I just hate that some "officers" are a complete disgrace to law enforcement and in fact to the Law itself.
SO ?????
Break the law you get your arse kicked. What is the problem? Why don't City prosecutors investigate the punk that broke the law?
 @dkgiovenco A real question here is, did he actually ever break any laws? ...or did he just "annoy" a cop by saying that he didn't? Sort of like the guy downtown who was harassed and arrested by a cop and charged with obstruction because "he looked like he was almost gonna jaywalk but then he didn't"...? (The one where a complaint to OPA resulted in OPA pressuring the prosecutor to file bogus charges - and ultimately led to the forced resignation of the head of OPA.)
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"I'm sorry officer, I was going to make a left turn at that intersection, but then I saw the 'no left turn' sign and realized I should not, so I turned off my signal and proceeded straight through instead." ... "OUTTA THE CAR, PUNK! DON'T YOU KNOW THAT TURN WOULDA BEEN ILLEGAL??? I COULDA GIVEN YOU A TICKET FOR THAT!!! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR OBSTRUCTING AN OFFICER AND RESISTING ARREST! ON THE GROUND! [thump-thump-whap-whap] GIMME YOUR HANDS!!! [click-clink]"
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Maybe you will get to "enjoy" something like that...
 @dkgiovenco Innocent until proven guilty.  Did he break the law?  There's Due Process.  This isn't about any of that.  This is about a crazy man who is currently an officer, about to be booted (probably).Â
 @ETSubmariner IMO part of the constitution that needs to be revised. In general....You go to a bank, you put a gun in a tellers face and demand money. You turn around with your money and there is a cop right there and off to jail you go. In this case and many many many other case it should be guilty until proven innocent.
 @dkgiovenco One day it will be YOUR right to due process: will there then be anyone left to stand up in YOUR defense?
 @JLS1950 I understand the point you are making regarding an officer accessing a situation and making the wrong assessment and what I am trying to point out is a situation where it is CLEARLY seen who is doing what. What makes me mad is you and I spend so much of our tax money wasting time on true guilty with indisputable evidence because it is their right to due process and a lot of the times this due process is stalled years on end by the defense of the accused. What about the due process for the Innocent? Â
 @dkgiovenco Your comment is non-responsive. I asked about a situation where the cop DID NOT see a gun (or perhaps the legitimate customer had a CPL) but only inferred a robbery because he saw a man with a large pile of cash. You seem to be so wound up in your own scenario that you are not capable of perceiving a slight variant and distinguishing between the two in order to understand the risks.Â
Unfortunately, too many police officers seem to have similar issues with discernment (are you one?) The cop who arrested "not-a-jaywalker" accosted him while explicitly stating that what he ALMOST did (but did not - he reportedly started to raise his foot as if to step off the curb and then stopped and returned it to the curb) was unlawful. In other words, the officer failed to distinguish between an infraction (jaywalking) and a lawful abandonment of an act to avoid that infraction. In essence, the officer was saying, "you are guilty because you would have done it if you had not stopped." In fact, there SEEMS even to have been an element of "You are obstructing me because you started to commit an infraction that I could cite but then you stopped and I cannot cite you after all, and that is obstructing me in my duties to cite you, so you are under arrest for obstruction!"!!!
In the scenario I presented, it is implied that the officer ASSUMES the man has robbed the bank because he is walking away with a large amount of cash: that would be an invalid and unlawful assumption, and would not give the officer probably cause.
And yet police officers do make analogous false assumptions in many cases. Note in particular that prosecutors refused even to charge this prisoner with any crime. Note that "not-a-jaywalker" was not charged with jaywalking, but rather (and quite literally) with obstruction and resisting arrest for not jaywalking!
In the case in Ballard that I have cited, officers arrested a woman for "obstructing" because she called 911 to report that two men (the officers in plainclothes) were savagely beating a homeless man at a bus shelter. Not quite the same issue - just another case of corrupt cops making corrupt accusations because they think know can get away with it.
 @JLS1950 and you are a friggin tree hugger. Do you want some milk and cookies? Let me break it down for your little mind...."You go to a bank, you put a gun in a tellers face and demand money. You turn around with your money and there is a cop right there." Do I REALLY have to put it in that.... the cop saw the man pull the gun, hand the teller a note? Did that simplify it for you?
 @dkgiovenco  @ETSubmariner "No criminal charges were filed against the man in the holding cell."
Still believe he deserved what he got?
 @dkgiovenco  @ETSubmariner ...and if you make a large by quite legitimate cash withdrawal from your own account, and the cop behind you in line accosts you and shoots you because it "looked like" you had robbed the bank?
Get your head out of your donkey!
You know, I don't blame him, walk around Seattle and see these punks mugging and intimidating people. Downtown Seattle is Gotham City. I think the police should be on every block after dark, so normal people who want to enjoy a dinner out can actually feel safe
It's what the "normal people" have to put up with when the city sets up all the freebies disquised as help. They come in droves to get them.
Wow is this actually a story about police that attorney James Egen didn't hand feed to KOMO? Â Â I am pretty sure upper KOMO management hates SPD with a passion. Â They seem to forget that 99.9 % of them work a thankless job and don't do anything wrong. Of course those stories where police save someone are not as sexy as the ones where someone crosses the line.
 @lakeunion If it was Seattle City Light workers behaving badly on the public dime, you would be all over it and demanding that KOMO post every sordid detail of the wrongdoing.
Police officers cost the public a heck of a lot more, and their misconduct exposes the public (taxpayers) to very substantial losses due to civil lawsuits and even just the defense of civil lawsuits. Which would you be more offended by: a City Light crew taking an unauthorized coffee break that costs ratepayers just under $100 - or an SPD officer injuring a citizen and costing the taxpayers $10 million - as in the case of Matt Paul and Christopher Harris? That's more than 100,000 unauthorized "coffee breaks".
Matt Paul, BTW (a KCSD deputy assigned to transit police, not SPD) is as I recall the same knucklehead who arrested the lady in Ballard for calling 911 and reporting that he and his partner were savagely beating up a homeless man at a bus shelter. He is also the same dodo who cut a turn from an arterial onto a side street in N. Seattle and struck a car stopped lawfully at a stop sign there - and then tried to blame it all on the teenage girl honor student driving the stopped car... for "failure to avoid an accident"!
 @JLS1950  I could give a damn about City light workers. I do care when I live in the city and see our police get slow motion one sided edited videos used against them without showing all the facts such as original 911 calls, the whole video and witness statements that agree with the police.  Too many tree huggers here so the bad guys are winning.
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As for Matt Paul who is a KSCD officer he had a right to chase Chris Harris down that alley. Chris Harris paid someone $60 to drive him from Edmonds to a Belltown alley and told the driver to wait in the car while he went to buy drugs. While Harris was in the alley he got pointed out WRONGLY by someone who thought he was an armed suspect involved in a crime that happened just prior to those officers arriving. So when he got pointed out and he started running away (due to him being in possession or in the process of buying drugs) Harris took off running for 4 blocks before finally slowing down and which point officer Paul shoved into the wall thinking Harris was armed.  Those facts dont matter to people.....just the 4 sec clip of harris getting shoved into the Wall is all that mattered to people like yourself.
 @lakeunion Matt Paul has a record of being abusive and of using excessive force. King County and the KCSD were found in court to have deliberately withheld information pertaining to Paul's past abuse of power and use of excessive force from plaintiffs representing Harris and his family during their lawsuit (settled for $10 million) and "Pierce County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Arend issued a $300,000 sanction against the county and left the door open for the family of Christopher Sean Harris to possibly receive millions more in compensatory damages."
In other words, just because Paul had a "history" and the county tried to hide that, it is quite possible that we the taxpayers will end up paying out ANOTHER $5 - $10 million to Harris and his family! THAT is part of why I do hate the ROGUE cops who visit this injustice upon all of us.
As for Harris' "drugs", all I can find is an accusation by a poster on another web site to the effect that Harris dropped a "baggie" during flight. I have not heard that such a "baggie" was recovered and entered into evidence. And as no weapon was either displayed or discovered, I find that Paul had no foundation whatsoever to assume one. However, I have seen ABUNDANT reference that Paul and his partner were (a) dressed in black without obvious police insignia, (b) did not clearly identify themselves as police officers before aggressively giving chase or at any time during the chase except at the last moment, (c) made no attempt to determine whether Harris was attempting to surrender once he did hear his pursuers finally identify themselves and once he was in a well-lighted place (outside the theater.)
The FBI and the DOJ seem to have accepted these arguments and they very severely chastised the KCSD over their handling of the case and their (lack of) discipline and training.
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My personal take on your argument? I think you are probably a somewhat abusive cop yourself - or else a "wannabe" who simply defends even bad cops in a knee-jerk manner. But that is just a wild guess.
 @lakeunion  Police are public employees. The media are important for uncovering stories about corruption and such. I would rather have our media keep the police in check than have paranoid gun militias think that it's their responsibility.Â
 @lakeview I would have rather have the media show all the facts including original 911 calls and witness statements. In this case this officer is wrong.....but usually KOMO posts videos of one sided edited clips presented by attorneys to make their clients look like they were wronged.Â