NAACP wants police chief out over shady drug bust

SEATTLE — Reports by two police officers on a disputed drug arrest are at odds with surveillance videotape, according to a sworn statement by a video analyst and forensic expert.

Citing the report by Grant Fredericks, a former police officer in Vancouver, British Columbia, and lecturer on video surveillance at the FBI Academy, NAACP leaders said last Wednesday that the officers should be fired, Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske should resign and the city’s police Office of Professional Accountability should be overhauled.

Assistant Police Chief Linda E. Pierce said the internal investigations unit conducted an “exhaustive investigation” before exonerating Officers Gregory P. Neubert and Michael A. Tietjen of accusations made by George “Troy” Patterson, 26, a convicted small-time drug dealer whom they arrested on Jan. 2.

“This investigation was thorough and is considered closed,” Pierce said.

The officers were disciplined for failing to report that they had detained another man at the scene and then let him go.

Patterson, who relies on a wheelchair, accused Neubert and Tietjen of excessive use of force and of planting drugs on him. Charges against him were dropped by King County, Wash., prosecutors, who alerted defense lawyers last month that Neubert and Tietjen were the subject of an internal investigation.

Since then, their credibility has become an issue in at least 17 pending felony drug and gun prosecutions in state and federal courts.

Police have resisted efforts by defense lawyers in nine cases to obtain documents from the internal probe but released the exterior drugstore surveillance videotape of the nighttime arrest of Patterson.

Fredericks, who was hired to review the 24-minute video by Lisa Daugaard, a lawyer with The Defender Association, said it showed the two officers lied about how and where they found drugs and bolstered Patterson’s claim that they had roughed him up.

Both officers wrote that they watched through binoculars from a nearby parking garage roof as Patterson sold drugs, then saw crumbs of cocaine “in plain view” on his lap when they approached and found a 1-gram rock of cocaine in his front waistband.

Neubert wrote that he saw Patterson one minute after he arrived from his observation point, but Fredericks noted that both officers were off their bicycles and had already handcuffed one man before Patterson is seen at the start of the video.

“The images are inconsistent with the statement that they left their ‘observation point’ to pursue Patterson, locating him one minute after they arrived,” Fredericks said in a sworn statement.

Five minutes into the arrest, Fredericks continued, there was nothing to show either officer paid any attention to Patterson’s lap — and a strong wind at the time made it “unlikely that ‘numerous chips and pieces of cocaine’ … could adhere to Patterson’s lap.”

The video also showed Neubert putting what Fredericks called a “clamp hold” on Patterson’s throat as Tietjen twisted his left arm into a “wristlock,” bringing the man’s head almost down to his knees and holding him in that position for nearly four minutes.

James Bible, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the police chief should resign, both officers should be fired, the internal investigation process should be overhauled and the FBI should investigate Patterson’s arrest.

“This is not a small issue,” Bible said. “It impacts everybody in our city.”

Sgt. Richard F. O’Neill, president of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, said those demands were absurd.

“To call for someone’s firing and the resignation of a chief of police based on that is incredible,” O’Neil said. “I’m really surprised this time the NAACP would go so far out on a limb to back an eight-time felon when there’s absolutely nothing that would warrant any more than the discipline the officers have already received.”

(Associated Press)