So here we have a woman whose drunken behavior outside of a Miami Beach nightclub condominium was unruly enough sleeping in the lobby caused police to be called and her to be handcuffed and brought to the station. While just outside the station she remained defiant both kicking and hurling racial slurs at African-American plain clothes Officer Phillipe Archer who responded by punching her in the head and kicking her.
This was the result two years ago for which he was just recently suspended without pay [for one month].
I'm gonna say that's there's just flat out no excuse for this. None. I don't care if she used the N-word against him and she was, rather ineffectually, kicking him in the shins. That doesn't justify a roundhouse punch in the eye. But I guess using physical brutality is just how
some Officers have begun to handle the public whether they are Black and the victim White. The only color authoritarians with badges truly care about is Blue. Still it's truly what happened after the incident that things became quite strange.
I wonder if the surveillance footage, which is over the flip, would be enough for even Fox News to admit that not all Cops have the public's safety in mind at all times? Would they perhaps consider calling this Officer a "Thug"? Hmm..
Via the Miami Herald.
It's pretty clear from watching the video that something beyond just the meager little kicks set Officer Archer off in order to foster such a violent response. But it doesn't matter. When my roomate Joe was a cadet at the Orange County Sheriffs Academy before he joined the Fullerton Police Department he described tons of insults and slurs that the training Officers would hurl at them specifically to make sure that they could emotionally handle anything that an irate member of the public might throw at them without losing their composure or their cool. They needed to know you could handle the pressure. Apparently Archer, whose a 19 year law enforcement veteran, never got that training. Or he needs some.
Details via Rawstory:
Surveillance footage released by the Miami Herald shows a visibly angry and handcuffed Adamescu kicking a police officer in the lower leg in the parking garage behind Beach police headquarters. The plain clothes police officer, Phillippe Archer, was black. Adamescu, who is white, reportedly directed a racial slur at Archer, prompting the cop to punch her in the face and launch a kick toward her head. A fellow officer (also in plain clothes) pulled Adamescu away.
This is when things began to get strange as a passerby, seeing the altercation with Ademescu, attempts to intervene and come to her "rescue" - called the cops himself, even though he was already dealing with a police officer, and escalated the melee.
While Archer was attacking Adamescu, a passerby named Andrew Mossberg stopped to intervene in what he believed to be a mugging. “Mossberg called the police and stepped in even after Archer identified himself,” the Miami Herald reports. “Adamescu then hit a distracted Archer, who struck her and Mossberg in the ensuing struggle.”
So I guess even when he's a Cop, a Black man hitting a White woman must be a "Thug" who needs the Cops called on him? Or something. The next thing is that none of the Officers involved reported what happened as they should have per procedure. It only became an issue
once the surveillance Video was discovered by an internal investigation.
Either way, even with the tape, neither the States Attorney nor the FBI choose to persue the matter against Archer, despite the injuries to Ademescu and to Mossberg.
“We received a complaint that Philippe Archer of your agency may have been involved in violating the civil rights of Andrew Mossberg and Megan Adamescu,” wrote Robert J. Moossy, Jr., criminal section chief of the civil rights division of the DOJ. “We recently completed our review of the results of the investigation of that complaint to determine whether a federal criminal prosecution was warranted. After careful consideration, we concluded that the evidence does not establish a prosecutable violation of the federal criminal civil rights statutes.”
From the States Attorney's Office:
“The battery that was the focal point of the possible criminal charge could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt given that the victim initiated it,” Griffith says
Assault? Nope. Battery? Nope. Civil Rights Violations? Nope. Obstruction for failing to report the incident? Nope. If you're drunk and impaired and you kick a cop in the shin, he gets to
sock you in the eye. Even when you're handcuffed. Uh, wow. That's not a good precedent.
Two years after the event, with a new Police and City Council Leadership in place Archer was by the Department with an unpaid suspension after an Internal Affairs Division investigation found the following:
“Your experience, knowledge of rules, policies and proper practice dictates that you knew you should have reported and documented the events at the police station, you knew that taking a photo with a prisoner was inappropriate, you knew you should have properly secured the prisoners, and you knew you used excessive force. Your lack of judgment and your poor decisions defy your tenure as a Miami Beach Police Officer of 19 years.”
Well, that's something. A least a drunk unruly White Woman - who is apparently also a model - who attacks and slurs a Cop, then gets punched out while the Officer violates policy by failing to report any of it, can finally get justice. Kinda. And it didn't even take a White Riot to accomplish.
Vyan
Wed May 06, 2015 at 10:01 AM PT: Some Corrections/Updates on this story which was based on the Miami Herald/Rawstory report that I received via Email from Adam Mossberg the second person injured by Officer Archer:
1) it was not outside a nightclub. It was next to a condominium on the residential side of Miami Beach, far away from any nightclubs
2) it was not her drunken behavior that set off his violent rage. It was that he was pulled off of an undercover drug sting to go deal with a drunk girl who fell asleep in a condo lobby.
3) the video shows the third attack he made against her - the other two were on the sidewalk next to the condo and witnessed by me and several others
4) the passerby was me. I was walking the dog with my son on my property when we saw him assaulting the woman. My entire “intervention" consisted of me handing our dog leash to my 12-year-old son and calling the police to report the assault.
5) “Thug” and “Gangster” were terms Archer repeatedly used to refer to himself in now-deleted Facebook posts.
This makes somewhat more sense because I had been wondering how Mossberg intervened when the video clearly show Adamescu being taking into the station immediately after being assaulted. Apparently this wasn't the first or only assault she suffered, but it was the only assault which was caught on camera and for which Archer was disciplined, he was not punished for what occurred previously between him, Adamescu and Mossberg even though Rawstory reported that Mossberg suffered enough cuts to require "some intense head bandaging".
Here's how the incident was reported by the
Daily News.
The confrontation began with Archer questioning a drunken Adamescu and bringing her out on a sidewalk to talk. Archer, who was in plain clothes, asked Adamescu for identification but she couldn’t open her purse so “I removed her purse from her person and retrieved her passport,” according to an arrest report obtained by WBFS-TV.
That’s when Adamescu became confrontational with the black detective, using racial slurs and trying to grab her passport back. Just at that moment, Andrew Mossberg was walking by and thought Archer was trying to steal the intoxicated woman’s purse. The Good Samaritan called police and tried to stop the apparent mugging but instead was assaulted by the officer.
“Apparently that really infuriated him, because he rushed me, kicked me in the head, the left side of the head, and knocks me on the ground,” Mossberg told the CBS affiliate shortly after the incident in 2013. “While I’m on the ground he punches me twice, and I’m knocked out.”
This was why he needed those bandages.
Let me repeat again, even though Miami Police had all this information as well as statements from both Mossberg and Adamescu, Archer was not charged or disciplined for two years - not until the tape was discovered and then only for the single punch to Adamescu's head in the police parking lot, not for any of his previous actions that night. It may be a bit premature to judge based on this one incident, but somehow I don't think this was Archer's first violent kick-fighting rodeo, and it probably won't be his last.
