In Baltimore, they call it a “rough ride.” In Philadelphia, they had another name for it that hints at the age of the practice — a “nickel ride,” a reference to old-time amusement park rides that cost five cents. Other cities called them joy rides.
The slang terms mask a dark tradition of police misconduct in which suspects, seated or lying face down and in handcuffs in the back of a police wagon, are jolted and battered by an intentionally rough and bumpy ride that can do as much damage as a police baton without an officer having to administer a blow.
The exact cause of the spinal injury that Freddie Gray, 25, sustained while in police custody in Baltimore before his death April 19 has not been made clear. The police have said that he was not strapped into a seatbelt, a violation of department policy. That has led some to wonder whether he was deliberately left unbuckled, reminiscent of a practice that while little known has left a brutal, costly legacy of severe injuries and multimillion-dollar settlements throughout the country.
A lawyer for the Baltimore police union and news reports Thursday focused on Mr. Gray’s ride in the back of the van after his arrest by Baltimore officers on April 12. “Our position is something happened inside that van,” the lawyer, Michael E. Davey, said at a news conference last week. “We just don’t know what.”
Determining exactly how Mr. Gray was injured will be a focus of the investigation. Even if it happened in the van, it does not necessarily point toward an intentional rough ride, a ritual experts said was at least several decades old. “I never saw it, but I’ve heard about it,” said Bernard K. Melekian, the undersheriff of Santa Barbara County, Calif., and a former director of the Justice Department’s community-oriented policing office. “My sense was that that kind of behavior had long been gone.”
The tradition was regarded as a technique by aggressive officers to inflict punishment on those they arrested without ever being accused of physically assaulting them with their weapons or hands. For a suspect with hands cuffed behind him, seated on a thin bench in the back of a speeding police van, a sudden stop or a sharp turn or a bumpy road can cause severe injuries that can leave a person in a wheelchair or disfigured for life.
One June night in 1980, Freddie Franklin was walking on 75th Street in Chicago with a friend when he said that a group of police officers wrongfully arrested him, placed him in handcuffs and forced him into the back of a wagon. Two officers drove the van recklessly, to throw him around the floor of the van, he said in a federal lawsuit. According to court documents, by the time Mr. Franklin arrived at the police station, he had bitten off his lower lip.
“It’s sort of a retaliatory gesture,” said Robert W. Klotz, a police-procedures expert and former deputy chief of police of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. “It’s one of those nebulous type of things where the individual feels they’ve been subjected to it because they’ve been mouthy. The officers say they have no intent in doing anything. It winds up in a he said-she said situation.”
Source: The New York Times | By MANNY FERNANDEZ
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