A white Wisconsin woman who served jail time for spitting in a teenage Black Lives Matter protestor’s face has won a $760,000 settlement after police broke into her home and arrested her without a warrant.
Stephanie Rapkin was caught on video spitting in the face of a BLM protestor on June 6, 2020, for which she was later convicted of disorderly conduct. She pleaded guilty and served 60 days in jail, much to the disappointment of her 17-year-old victim, a Black high school student who helped organize the rally and had hoped she’d receive harsher punishment.
But Rapkin’s lawsuit centered around the actions of officers of two Milwaukee area police departments who came to arrest her the next day for another alleged assault.
According to her complaint, after the spitting incident, angry protestors went to Rapkin’s house “to confront her” and “verbally berate her.” One, a young man in his 20s, alleged that she came out of her home and pushed him. He called police to make a complaint against Rapkin, then 63.
“This is the chick that did the spitting in the kid’s face,” an officer said as he arrived on the scene, reported TMJ4 News, based on police bodycam footage.
After reviewing the protestor’s cellphone video, officers from the Village of Shorewood Police Department decided to arrest her, Rapkin claimed. Officers then knocked on her door and windows for about 30 minutes while discussing their plan to arrest her for disorderly conduct. They called for a female police officer from the Village of Whitefish to help with the arrest.
“If she comes out, arrest her,” one officer said. The other officers then “conspired to come up with a justification to break into her house,” never considering obtaining a warrant, the complaint alleges.
They found their false pretense, the lawsuit says, after speaking with a neighbor who told them that Rapkin had taken a sleeping pill earlier that day because she was “exhausted.”
“So she’s taking multiple doses of sleeping medication?” a police lieutenant asked. “I don’t know,” the neighbor replied, prompting a police decision to do a welfare check on Rapkin.
In the video, officers are seen breaking through the front door and entering with guns and Tasers drawn. They stood at the bottom of Rapkin’s stairs and ordered her to come down and speak with them so they could “check on her.”
Rapkin, who is an attorney, asked, “Gentlemen, do you have a warrant?”
“We’re here for a community caretaker, OK?” an officer replied.
“I’m perfectly fine. I’m sleeping.” Rapkin said, adding that she had not taken any sleeping medication and wanted them to leave so she could go back to sleep.
Rapkin was then placed under arrest in her dining room, where officers told her she was being charged with “assaulting an individual outside, revealing their true motivation for going into Rapkin’s home without a warrant,” her complaint says.
A scuffle ensued, during which police claimed Rapkin kneed an officer in the groin. She claimed they threw her up against a wall while screaming in her face. She was escorted from her home to applause from protestors outside and put into a police vehicle.
The officers then proceeded to search her home for evidence that Rapkin had “abused” her medication, coming up empty-handed, the lawsuit says.
Felony assault charges against Rapkin for allegedly kicking the officer were later dropped.
Rapkin lawyered up, and her complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin in May of 2023 charged police, including the Shorewood police chief who approved the arrest, with violating her Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
According to the complaint, a federal judge who granted a motion to suppress the evidence gathered from the search of her home agreed, calling the search “outrageous police conduct” and ruling that “a reasonable officer would have … come to the conclusion that either you need to get a warrant or wait till her attorney brings her down to the station house to talk. Period.”
Rapkin’s lawsuit sought compensatory and punitive damages against eight individually named officers, the Village of Whitefish and the Village of Shorewood, alleging that the latter’s police department has a policy of “falsely invoking the community caretaker doctrine to break into private citizens’ homes.”
The suit aimed to “vindicate the violation of Rapkin’s constitutional rights” and “to effect change through punitive damages by punishing the defendants for their total disregard of the Constitution with the hope that the punishment is significant enough to prevent this from happening again.”
Both police departments denied all of the allegations of illegal or unconstitutional conduct in their answers to the lawsuit and also claimed qualified immunity from liability for their officers.
Shorewood Village Manager Rebecca Ewald said last week that the $760,000 settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing but rather a decision to avoid the cost and risk of a trial, reported Fox 6 News. She noted that the city’s insurance company, not its taxpayers, would be paying for the large civil judgment award.
“The police officers had a really easy route to avoid trouble, which is just call a judge,” Rapkin’s attorney, James Odell, told TMJ4.
If they were truly concerned about Rapkin’s welfare, Odell said, they should have left after confirming she was safe.
“You’re not allowed to stick around and hope that you get the opportunity to do police activity when you were really supposed to be there to make sure everyone was safe,” he said.
Shorewood’s police chief said that none of the officers involved in the incident were suspended or disciplined for their actions.
