The San Diego Police Department is facing an excessive force lawsuit after officers were captured on camera repeatedly firing non-lethal beanbag rounds and releasing a K-9 to bite a Black man who was unarmed and appeared to be surrendering. Police officers, who were responding to a report about a domestic incident involving a firearm on Oct. 24, claimed the man, 31-year-old Marcus Evans, was “repeatedly ordered” to surrender and refused, but, booooy, that is not what the video footage showed. Now, Evans is suing the police department, and the use of force incident is under investigation.
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From Fox 5 San Diego:
In the video, Evans can be seen walking out of the house without shoes or a shirt, holding his hands in the air. He told officers “I have no gun,” then sat down on a ledge near the home with his hands still up. SDPD later confirmed he did not have a firearm.
Shortly after he sat on the ledge, the first of three beanbag rounds was fired, hitting him in the abdomen and causing him to fall on to several steps below in visible pain.
An officer can then be heard shouting “We said hands” as Evans is lying in a fetal position, to which he responds by trying to show his hands. He also can be heard asking officers “Why you shoot me?”
A few minutes later, Evans can be seen sitting up on a step outside the house, still with his arms up. That is when the second round is fired and the K-9 is released on him, the video shows. The dog appears to bite his arm as he can be heard saying, “Stop please.”
Following more back and forth with officers from the step, the third round is fired and the police K-9 is released a second time, again biting his arm. Evans can be heard in the video crying out in pain as the dog thrashes with his arm and pulls him down the steps onto the ground.
As several officers surround him to place him in handcuffs, Evans can be heard pleading, “I can’t feel my hand, please stop.”
So, just to recap: Evans walked out of his home with his hands in the air and announced that he was unarmed only to be shot with beanbags because officers, apparently, were unable to see his hands, which they let him know while he was lying in the fetal position after being shot. Then, after Evans sat up and tried to put his arms up to comply with the cops’ demands (despite the fact that it seems he was already complying with those demands as he exited his home), he was shot again and a k-9 unit was released on him. THEN Evans was shot again and bitten again for no discernable reason, and he was handcuffed. Later, the officers determined that Evans, in fact, had no gun, which is what he immediately informed him of in the first place.
Also, despite the fact that he was unarmed and not resisting, Evans was initially charged with — *checks notes* — assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest. Those charges were later dropped.
“I don’t know why they used this force and I think that is a burning question for the community to know. Why was this type of force used and applied on this person at this time,” said Evans’ lawyer, Dante Pride, who said his client’s injuries forced him to have to leave a job in construction he only recently obtained.
SDPD officials confirmed Evans was transported to a hospital for treatment of the injuries sustained to his arm, stomach, chest, groin and shin.
Perhaps the involved officers were under the very false impression that it isn’t really police brutality if it isn’t lethal, but that’s really not how it works — the force just needs to be brutal.
“Despite posing absolutely zero threat to officers, SDPD officers inexplicably decided to deploy multiple attacks of force … in contravention of both SDPD’s training policies and POST standards,” the lawsuit reads. “This misconduct resulted in serious and traumatic injuries to (Evans).”
Meanwhile, the SDPD has released a statement of its own, admitting that the video footage is “difficult to view” and confirming that the incident is being investigated.
“As with many uses of force, videos of this nature are very difficult to view,” Police Chief Scott Wahl said. “We are already in the process of conducting a thorough review of the incident, and I’m committed to exploring how the situation could have been handled differently.”
“The San Diego Police Department welcomes conversations about our use of force procedures and regularly evaluates those practices to determine if improvements are needed,” Wahl continued.
In this case, “exploring how the situation could have been handled differently” seems like it would be an easy task because none of what happened to Evans needed to happen. Hopefully, he gets everything he’s suing for, and the department is serious about holding its unnecessarily brutal police officers accountable.
We’re always told, “Everything will be fine if we just comply,” but incidents like these, lethal or not, easily suggest otherwise.
