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Dirty Little Secrets

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The department released a censored summary in the case of Nancy Meyer, who collected $30,000 after she was beaten by Officer Christina Gonzalez during the 1999 Mardi Gras celebration in Soulard. Gonzalez, a probationary officer, eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. Lieutenant Daniel G. Simpher recommended that she be dismissed from the force.

The department released no documents in six other brutality cases that resulted in lawsuits settled with taxpayer money. The biggest winner was Gregory Bell, a mentally handicapped man who was beaten by police in 1997 after he accidentally triggered a burglar alarm in his own home. Bell collected $250,000, but Stelzer says the department can't release any records about the incident because former Sergeant Thomas Moran was acquitted of assault charges in the case, and state law requires that records be sealed when defendants are acquitted of criminal charges.

In the other five cases, settlement amounts ranged from $8,000 to $25,000. According to court documents and plaintiffs' attorneys, the plaintiffs all complained to internal affairs before suing the police. None were convicted of crimes stemming from the incidents that sparked their lawsuits.

Crawford Miller, age 74, sued after officers in search of marijuana and drug profits broke down his door on March 6, 2000. Miller has driven a cab in St. Louis for 54 years and has never been charged with a crime, according to court records in St. Louis and St. Louis County. He was in bed recovering from radiation treatment for lung cancer when officers arrived. His first inkling of trouble came when he heard someone on his porch.

"They didn't knock," Miller recalls. "I didn't know they were the police -- they never said 'police officer' or nothing." He says the officers wore military-style fatigues instead of standard-issue uniforms and broke down his door just as he was opening it. "I'm looking in the barrel of a shotgun," he recounts. "I thought I was being robbed."

Miller says he ran from the doorway toward a shotgun he kept behind his bed. He was about twelve feet away from his gun when the officers caught him. "They threw me down on the floor," he remembers. "I was telling them that I had just had a cancer operation and I couldn't put my hands behind me -- I'd had half of my left lung removed. They told me they didn't give a damn what I'd had. They put their foot in my back and pulled my arms behind my back, broke three of my ribs and pulled my rotator cuff out of the socket, and put handcuffs on me. They went through everything in the house -- they even went through my garbage."

Police found neither drugs nor money, although court records show they seized the shotgun. Miller says police also took his prescribed Percocet and a bottle of expensive cologne.

After he telephoned the station to complain, a sergeant who'd taken his pain medication returned the call, Miller says. "I knew his voice. He told me, 'Ain't nobody taken your medicine.' They didn't do nothing. So the next day I got up and went down to internal affairs."

That didn't work either, Miller says. "They told me I would hear from them, and I never heard from them. When I didn't hear from them, I would call. They would say I had to come in. So I would go again."

Nearly four years after the raid, Miller hasn't heard the results of the internal-affairs investigation. "Nobody did nothing," he says. "Calling the police on the police does no good, because they don't go against each other."

According to the federal government, Miller and others who have complained to the St. Louis police department's internal-affairs division shouldn't have to wonder about the outcome of investigations.

In guidelines issued in 1999 and updated in 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice recommends that police departments release as much information as possible about internal-affairs cases. At a minimum, the guidelines say, departments should tell complainants whether their allegations were upheld or dismissed, and why.

"You have to tell people how their complaint was responded to," explains Daryl Borgquist, spokesman for the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, which published the guidelines. "You can build trust between people when you have communication and things are open."

In the Jason Cole case, Cecilia Nadal, owner and president of Productive Futures, called internal affairs the same day the teenager was arrested. A year later, she's still waiting to hear the results of the probe.

"We were waiting for the legal system to work and hoping that it would," Nadal says. "And to this point, it hasn't. It's so clear to me that the culture of internal affairs is one of defensiveness and not objectivity."

Alderman Terry Kennedy, whose ward includes the strip mall where Cole was arrested, says he made sure police were aware that he wanted to be notified of the investigation's outcome. He says he last inquired about the case in late summer, but he hasn't heard anything back.

South-side resident Tom Hallaran says police haven't told him anything about an internal-affairs complaint he lodged after his home on Illinois Avenue was raided shortly before the World Agricultural Forum last spring. Police seized computer equipment, papers, climbing gear, welding tools and assorted other belongings. "'Instruments of crime that could be used in protest situations' -- that's what it said on the warrant," says Hallaran.

Hallaran says he's still missing about $600 worth of computer equipment and climbing gear. Occupants of a nearby home that was also raided say tires were slashed while bicycles were in police custody and that their belongings reeked of urine when they were allowed back into the building several days after the raids.

Hallaran recalls that he spoke twice with internal-affairs investigators, once within a week of the raid and again in June, after Chief Mokwa ordered an investigation to determine whether officers had damaged property. That, Hallaran says, was his last contact with police. "They haven't followed up with us at all. They haven't brought any charges, but we still haven't received a lot of our stuff back and we don't know the status of what they're doing."

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