Another Case Study

Jonathan Villareal - Another Case Study in the Use of Non-Lethal Force in Schools.

Derby student says cops used Taser, broke his arm because of sagging pants


BY FRED MANN
The Wichita Eagle


Mike Hutmacher/The Wichita Eagle | Buy this photo
Derby high school student Jonathan Villarreal claims two Derby Police SROs beat and tazed him and broke his arm because he refused to pull up his pants. Photographed Thursday, Apr. 28, 2011.
DERBY — A Derby High School sophomore said today that he was hit by a Taser and had his arm broken by two school resource officers for refusing to pull up his pants.
The Derby Police Department said it will investigate the incident. The officers work for the department.
The teen and the Police Department offered differing accounts of what happened.
Jonathan Villarreal, 17, said he was walking with friends to the bus after school on Wednesday when one of the officers ordered him to pull up his pants. He told them he could wear them how he wanted because school was out, he said.
Villarreal said he had pulled his jeans low on his hips, as is fashionable among some young men, after leaving the school.
He said one of the officers, a man who was larger than him, pulled him to the ground by the neck and told him to stop resisting arrest. Villarreal denied he was resisting.
Both officers kneed him in the back and neck while he was on the ground, he said.
Because they were physical with him, he struggled to get up, but was pushed back down, he said.
At one point as he tried to get up, Villarreal said he felt his arm break when he was pushed back down.
After Villarreal tried three times to get up, one officer fired a Taser at his chest, he said. Although he was wearing a heavy coat, he still felt an electrical shock, he said.
Villarreal said the officers handcuffed him in spite of his complaints about pain in his arm, and kept him handcuffed until paramedics arrived and ordered the cuffs removed.
During the altercation, he said, an officer struck him in the eye, which was swollen shut.
Villarreal was taken by ambulance to a hospital, treated and released.
Derby Police Chief Robert Lee said Villarreal used profanities when the officers asked him to pull up his pants.
Lee also said the officers tried to escort Villarreal back inside the school to the office, but he refused to go.
At one point during the struggle, Lee said, Villarreal stood up and took "an aggressive stance," which led to the Taser attempt.
Three students who witnessed the incident supported Villarreal's account during a news conference this afternoon at the Sunflower Community Action offices, 1407 N. Topeka,
Lee said his department will investigate, as is normal procedure, to see whether the use of force was appropriate.
He said he also has notified the student's family about how to make a formal complaint with his department.
Lee said he expects the department will present the case to Sedgwick County juvenile authorities in the District Attorney's Office, who would make a decision about filing any charges.
Villarreal's family is looking into legal action, according to Emira Palacios, of Sunflower Community Action.


Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2011/04/28/1827093/derby-teen-says-officers-injured.html#ixzz1KwKD9z6X

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   This incident is, and will continue to be, an extremely unfortunate circumstance for everyone involved.  The repercussions will be far-reaching and expensive. But let’s examine each element of the story as we know it from the news report.


Part I:  Defining the incident.


   Jonathon Villarreal claims the SROs (Student Resource Officers) tazed him and broke his arm because he refused to hike up his ‘sagging’ pants.  The way this is stated in the news report, Villarreal implies that these were punitive actions by the police as punishment for non-compliance with the school’s dress code.  I’m sure he (and his attorneys) like to convince a jury that the police actions were punitive.


   A more accurate rendition of the facts and circumstances would be: Jonathon Villarreal sustained his injuries in the course of resisting two police officers who were attempting to take him into custody after they arrested him.  (Whether or not the arrest was justified and lawful, and whether or not the specific techniques used to effect the arrest were appropriate and appropriately executed is the business of the review board investigating the matter.)


Part II:  “Sagging.”


   The practice of “sagging” (described by the reporter as a practice that is “fashionable among some young men”) started in the prison system.  Wearing your pants in such a manner in prison was a signal to all of the other inmates that your were someone’s ‘prison bitch’- the willing recipient of acts of sodomy – as well as your disrespect for prison rules and prison authority.


   Villarreal and all of the other ‘young men’ who engage in the practice of ‘sagging’ are sending a signal that they enjoy the practice of sodomy and that they enjoy being the ‘catcher’ rather than the ‘pitcher.’  This goes to demonstrate Villarreal’s antisocial attitude toward school rules and school authority.  Therefore, it is no great surprise to me that Villarreal intentionally disregarded the school’s dress code and swore at the school resource officers that suggested to him that he should adjust his pants to bring them into compliance with the dress code.


Part III: The Taser®.


   Evidenced by the opinion section of the newspaper following the news report, many people assumed (at the suggestion of the reporter) that use of a Taser® was, in-and-of itself, excessive force.  I disagree.


   Had the Taser been effective, or had the SROs


   What Tasers® and pepper spray do is ‘soften’ the resisting subject and reduces their ability to resist and fight.  It does this by ‘scrambling’ the electrochemical signals from the brain to the muscles, causing a good degree of muscular dysfunction. Had the Taser been effective, Villarreal probably wouldn’t have been able to muster enough resistance from his dysfunctional muscles to result in his arm breaking.  (Pepper spray causes similar dysfunction due to sensory overload.)


   The use of the Taser® was appropriate in light of the active resistance, and it was a good try on behalf of the SRO.


   The Taser® is an especially appropriate arrest tool in school environments where the general population is young and has not yet achieved higher cognitive development.  Being more prone to bad judgement in relation to authority, the likelihood of encountering combative kids is proportionally higher than with adult populations.


   Also, the younger the kid, the more prone they are to injuries such as Villarreal suffered.  Turning off the kids’ ability to resist and fight significantly reduces the odds of an injury – for both kids and officers.


Part IV: The ‘black eye.’


   There’s no way around the fact that Villarreal suffered an impact to his left eye – and we probably have to assume it happened during his altercation with the SROs.  (It’s possible that it could have happened in association with some other incident, but I’ll give Villarreal the benefit of the doubt on this one.)


   But here again, if Villarreal had chosen to comply rather than to resist and fight, he would have suffered no injuries at all.


   Police are trained to avoid targeting any place on a suspect’s head or face when engaged in physical combat.  But given the dynamics of physical combat, just about anything can happen -–including impacts with unintended targets.  The fact that Villarreal suffered this injury is evidence to me that he was an active resistor dynamically involved in physical altercation with the SROs rather than the passive resistor he claims to be.  It is more likely that Villarreal moved his face into the impact than it is an officer intentionally struck Villarreal in the face.


Part V: Summary.


   I have to admit that I am more inclined to believe the statements of police officers than I am antisocial, antiauthoritarian 14-year olds looking for a payday.  Part of that is due to professional bias and nearly four decades of dealing with juveniles.  But from a practical perspective, police officers have been screened by panels that lend an ear and an eye to their propensity toward honesty and integrity before they are awarded a position of trust in the community.  Police officers are vetted by a variety of character witnesses as well as psychological screening before they are awarded a position of trust in the community.  Police officers are professionally trained and police officers are aware of the potential costs of falsifying reports and would be logically motivated to avoid that.


   14-year old boys with a head start on an antisocial personality disorder are prone to embellishments and contrivances – especially when they are motivated, coached and supported by an anti-authority, anti-police organization such as is Sunflower Community Action.


   The sad fact is that the City of Derby (or their insurance carrier) will likely pay young Mr. Villarreal a fairly sizeable monetary settlement when all is said and done.  I don’t necessarily believe that the SROs did anything all that drastically wrong, but what they did could have been done differently and probably better.  (Of course I’m Monday morning quarterbacking with the luxury of 20/20 hindsight.)  But unless Villarreal did something that isn’t detailed in the news article that warranted the arrest, the better option for the SROs would have been to disengage and file a formal complaint with the school administration for Villarreal’s violation of the dress code and his subsequent abhorrent behavior.  Hopefully that would have lead to a two or three-day suspension for him.  (Hopefully, he will still be served a suspension or even an expulsion behind this incident in as much as he and his behavior were the precipitating factor.)


   The cost of this skirmish to Villarreal was the tangible physical damage.  The cost of the skirmish to the Derby Police Dept. (and ultimately to the taxpayer) will be whatever monetary amount they decide to settle the matter for - that, and a fair degree of public trust.  (The Derby School District might also suffer some monetary damages depending if and to what degree they’re responsible for supervising the SROs.)  The SROs will suffer some career impediment behind the incident.  No body comes out of situations like these ahead.

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Addendum - 9 August 2011:  


The Derby Police Department has completed it's internal investigation into the Jonathon Villarreal incident.  As I thought they might, the facts of the matter as relayed by young Mr. Villarreal were significantly different than the facts uncovered by the official investigation.  It seems that Mr. Villarreal's sagging-pants fashion statement wasn't even the cause of the confrontation with the School Resource Officers.  That was just the line he used to suck the Sunflower Action Group and the local media into his little pay-day fantasy bid.  It turns out that the SROs were arresting him for disorderly conduct.  It seems Mr. Villarreal was attempting to incite violence by shouting racial epithets (specifically using the 'N' word) at a nearby group of black students.  Mr. Villarreal was order to cease a desist, but refused.  So the officers determined that his arrest was both appropriate and necessary.  The fact finders determined that Mr. Villarreal violently resisted the officers during the course of the arrest.  


I'm going to assume that Mr. Villarreal will likely proceed with a lawsuit against the Derby Police Dept. and/or the Derby School District anyway.  I'm sure his dreams (and his attorney's dreams) of an enormous payday have evaporated to some degree.  But I'm sure they still see a few thousand dollars in nuisance value just to go away.  The problem with that is that even a small settlement to avoid the more exorbitant costs associated with a trial gives the appearance of an admission of guilt to those who don't understand how the civil legal system works.


There will still be some residual stigma as fall out from this incident because the media's follow-up to an incident is never as prominently published as the original articles. But, at least it's good to see some of the wind taken out of young Mr. Villarreal's sails.