Philadelphia police, in shock over Saturday's murder of one of their own, are facing a probe over the violent beating of three shooting suspects by up to 15 officers - an arrest captured on video by a news helicopter hovering overhead.
The beating, Monday night in North Philadelphia, is seen on roughly one minute of an 11-minute video that Fox29 broadcast early yesterday and streamed over its Web site.
The three men beaten were suspects in a shooting unrelated to Saturday's murder of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski.
Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey yesterday promised a full investigation of the incident, which the commissioner said might be related to the stress police personnel are under as they hunt for a fugitive in Liczbinski's murder.
Ramsey said the officers in the Fox29 video would be taken off street duty as soon as they were identified.
Although police did not identify the suspects in the video, Center City lawyer D. Scott Perrine announced yesterday that he would represent all three at their bail hearings.
Perrine identified one suspect as long-standing client Dwayne Dyches, 24, and the others as Brian Hall and Pete Hopkins.
Perrine said they had been chased and apprehended without probable cause, and he called the beating "police conduct that should have stopped in the 1970s."
"This was one of the most reprehensible displays of police brutality I have ever seen," he said.
Perrine said all three had required hospital treatment. He said Dyches has a "baseball-size" lump and cut over one eye and was having difficulty moving one leg. "He had to have two officers helping him to walk out of the hospital," Perrine said.
Police did not comment on the suspects' conditions and injuries.
The video shows police cars chasing a gold sedan to a stop in the 3700 block of North Second Street, where about six to eight officers, with guns drawn, swarm over the sedan. As more officers race up to the car, one beats the passenger's side with a baton.
All four doors are pulled open, and as each of the three men is pulled from the car, he is tossed to the street and surrounded by three to five officers. Three or four officers begin trying to handcuff the driver and can be seen delivering at least 13 kicks to his head and sides, as well as several punches.
The passenger pulled from the rear seat is kicked by four officers and struck four or five times by an officer who appears to be wielding a baton.
A canine officer stands nearby, restraining an excited police dog.
After the beating, the remaining 10 minutes of the video show officers rolling the suspects as they search their pockets, search the vehicle, and take them away in separate patrol vehicles. Lt. Frank Vanore, a police spokesman, said Nutter and Ramsey had viewed the Fox29 video at the studio and ordered an investigation.
"We realize that our officers are all under an excess of stress right now, but we still have to do our job in a professional manner," Vanore said. "There's really no excuse for this."
In the meantime, he said, Ramsey has restricted police shifts to 12 hours and will encourage officers and their superiors to use department counseling services if they are have difficulty dealing with stress.
Vanore, however, maintained that all three suspects will be charged with participating in the shooting, which wounded three people Monday night at Fourth and Annsbury Streets in the Feltonville section of North Philadelphia.
Police had the three men and the gold 2000 Mercury Marquis in sight from the moment it arrived at the scene of the shooting until it was stopped about two miles away on North Second Street, Vanore said.
No weapon was found in the vehicle after the stop, Vanore said, but he added that a fourth man who arrived with the three others had fired at the crowd of people and then fled on foot.
John J. McNesby, president of Lodge 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police, said it was unclear how much the suspects had resisted officers.
"There's always two sides to every video," he said. "Let's not rush to judgment. Right now we have police under fire in the city of Philadelphia, and we have to be prepared to handle it."
McNesby also said the police believed the suspects were armed and had just been involved in a shooting. "It's not like these three guys were coming home from church."
Police said the shooting was apparently retaliation for a murder Sunday night in the same neighborhood. In that shooting, Andrew Coach, 20, Feltonville, died about an hour after being found in the 4500 block of North Fourth Street, shot in the abdomen.
No comments:
Post a Comment