The Chicago Police Department reassigned an officer caught on bodycam footage choking a handcuffed boy who was suffering a mental health crisis.
The cop’s reassignment came after the city’s administrator for Civilian Office Police Accountability called for his superiors to strip him of his official police duties, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The oversight agency’s administrator, Andrea Kersten, stated in a July 15 letter to the police superintendent that the cop used “deadly force” on a boy after he was dispatched to an incident on June 27 in the 4700 block of South Cottage Grove.
According to Kersten’s letter obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, the officer went to the scene with a new officer he was training. The details of the police call weren’t released to the Sun-Times, but when the officers arrived, they encountered the boy and two other individuals.
At some point, the cop in charge pulled out his gun and pressed it to the boy’s back. He backed off after the boy told him, “Blow my brains out,” Kersten’s letter states.
The officer then pinned the boy to the ground and pressed his fist on the boy’s neck after a struggle ensued.
According to Kersten’s letter, the bodycam footage showed the boy “making gurgling sounds, clawing at the training officer’s fist and gasping for air,” and telling the cop, “I can’t breathe.”
The boy later told the police oversight civilian agency that “he could hear ringing in his ears and almost passed out” during the struggle.
After the boy was restrained, he was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police vehicle. He was left there without supervision for nearly a half hour.
During that time, he moved his cuffed hands to the front of his body, grabbed a pocket knife from his pants’ front pocket, and cut a cable to the police car’s camera.
Then, he “used a seat belt to strangle himself,” Kersten wrote.
The cop who pulled the gun on the boy finally returned to the vehicle and noticed the boy was unresponsive when he failed to respond to questions.
The video showed the cop remove the seatbelt wrapped around the boy’s neck, then “forcefully” pull him out of the car, “causing him to fall out of the vehicle and land roughly on the pavement,” the letter states.
When the boy regained consciousness, another struggle started and the officer put his fist on the boy’s throat again while the boy was still cuffed. The cop reportedly failed to report the amount of pressure he applied to the boy’s neck, which Kersten called a “glaring omission.”
Police launched an internal investigation the day after the incident. A deputy chief reviewed the bodycam footage and found the cop violated department policy.
“The fact that [the officer] did these things in the presence of a probationary police officer and while acting as a field training officer is especially alarming,” Kersten wrote in her letter.
The Sun-Times didn’t name the officer who was reassigned but reported that he joined the police department in 2014 and now receives a six-figure salary. He has submitted at least 10 use-of-force reports in his time on the force and has been at the center of five complaints.
Kersten mentioned a previous incident in which the cop left two other detained individuals unattended — “misconduct he appears to have repeated in this case.” He faced minor disciplinary action for that incident.
After this most recent incident, a police spokesperson said the officer was reassigned to the department’s alternate response unit, which is staffed by cops with disciplinary issues and those not medically cleared for full duty.
