A homeless man barely moved while two Buffalo police officers stood over him on a sidewalk while one struck him with a baton six times before jamming it into his upper body.

The man was on the ground in a fetal position and showed no signs that he was resisting arrest.

A local resident who witnessed the March 13 incident captured about 40 seconds of the encounter on her cell phone, and said she was disturbed by what she saw.

The incident happened at about 11:10 p.m. Officers Joseph Walters and Richard Lopez wrote in reports claimed that they were allegedly on routine patrol when motorists flagged them down about an individual who allegedly turned aggressive when people refused to give him money.

Walters wrote that the individual “became verbally aggressive towards me and refused to get on the sidewalk.”

“I used my hands to guide him onto sidewalk and he pulled away many times and kept wandering into moving traffic,” Walters wrote in the use of force report. “He was eventually corralled onto a lot out of the street but refused to identify himself and kept reaching into his coat despite orders to stop. He was pulled to the ground to keep him still in an effort to calm him and identify him and pat down frisk him for weapons.”

The woman who recorded the video said she saw the man trying to pull away from officers as they walked him to a sidewalk, but once they reached the sidewalk, they pushed him to the ground. She said the man was in that neighborhood before and she’s never seen him get aggressive.

“At no point did they ever cuff him,” the witness said. “They didn’t seem like they were attempting to cuff him. Actually, what they did was push him to the ground and started beating him.”

Lopez’s use of force report states that the individual refused his orders to leave and give his name.

“Subject approached me in a threaten matter and I used my police issue baton to take away the threats, and forced him to the ground,” Lopez wrote.

However, the video obtained by the witness showed the man was already on the ground in a fetal position when Lopez struck him six times with the baton.

Both officers wrote that the man fled before they could write him a ticket.

But the witness of the incident said that the man never fled because she talked to him afterwards. It was then, she said, that she noticed he had an injured hand and a bump on his head. Officers both wrote in the use of force reports that they did not see any injuries.

“His hand looked like it was broken,” the woman said. “He had a very large lump that almost looked like back in the day if you see a cartoon character got hit in the head.”

Policy Violations

Buffalo Police Department policy states that officers must activate their body-worn cameras when responding to, servicing, and clearing any calls for service, as well as when conducting a traffic stop and when executing a search or arrest warrant, among other examples. Neither officer had their body cameras on, in violation of departmental policy, so the police department said it had no body cam video of what happened.

Department policy requires officers to fill out a specific form to explain why their body cameras were not activated or why they malfunctioned. The use of force report indicates that Lopez’s camera was “improperly deactivated” but provides no additional details.In addition. However, neither officer filled out a required form that would have explained why the body cameras were not turned on.

The department’s use of force policy states that officers can use objectively reasonable force to effect an arrest or prevent someone from escaping custody if the force used is consistent with state law. In other words, they may have had cause to use force at some point during the incident if the man did indeed resist or try to escape custody. The policy states that “excessive or unreasonable force shall not be used” and that officers can only use the amount of force that is objectively reasonable to overcome a subject’s resistance or aggression.

Despite evidence from the witness that the man was not resisting arrest and officers did not issue a ticket, Captain Jason Whitenight, wrote in the use of force report that the officers followed “the standards set forth by the Buffalo Police MOP. The officer used the correct amount of force needed to remove a subject from the street and then attempt to issue a ticket,” Whitenight wrote.

Outcome

No known disiplinary actions were taken against due to the misconduct and brutality of Buffalo Police Officer Walters and Lopez.

Wilson Morales was shot by Buffalo police officers after a car chase on the city’s East Side. The bullet that struck Morales, then a 17-year-old student at WNY Maritime Charter School, instantly paralyzed him from the chest down.

Outcome

Morales, who is still recuperating, faces trial on charges of assaulting a police officer and unlawfully fleeing from a police officer.

Buffalo’s Common Council authorized one of the largest lawsuit settlements in the city’s history: $4.5 million to Morales. A grand jury cleared Officer Karl B. Schultz and a partner at the time, Jason R. Whitenight, agreeing they fired in self-defense as the teenager backed the van he was driving toward Whitenight at the tail-end of a high-speed chase.