A Chicago police officer was sidelined after body-camera footage revealed he choked a handcuffed boy in the throes of a mental health crisis earlier this summer.
Andrea Kersten, chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, urged Police Supt. Larry Snelling to strip the field training officer of his policing powers in a July 15 letter.
Kersten said the officer was training a new cop when he used what amounted to “deadly force” against the boy, who was taken to a hospital for mental health treatment after the incident.
A police spokesperson said the officer has been relieved of his powers and was reassigned to the department’s alternate response section, a unit staffed by cops with disciplinary issues and those not medically cleared for full duty.
The Sun-Times isn’t naming the officer because he hasn’t formally been accused of wrongdoing.
The troubling incident unfolded early June 27 in the 4700 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue, according to the letter obtained through a public records request. The reason for the call was redacted in the document.
When the officer arrived at the scene with a probationary cop and encountered the boy and two other people, the officer pulled out his gun and pressed it against the boy’s back. The officer only relented when the boy — described only as a juvenile — told him to “blow my brains out,” Kersten said.
The officer then placed the boy on the ground and pressed his fist against the boy’s neck during a struggle, Kersten said. Video showed the boy “making gurgling sounds, clawing at the training officer’s fist and gasping for air.”
“I can’t breathe,” the boy said.
He later told COPA “he could hear ringing in his ears and almost passed out.”
After the boy was handcuffed, the training officer left him in the back of a police vehicle unattended for nearly half an hour. The boy was able to move the handcuffs to the front of his body, allowing him to grab a pocket knife from his pants to cut a cable connecting the vehicle’s camera.
He also “used a seatbelt to strangle himself,” Kersten said.
The officer only noticed the boy was unresponsive when he failed to respond to questions, Kersten said. Body-camera video showed that the officer unwrapped the seatbelt from the boy’s neck and “forcefully” pulled him outside, “causing him to fall out of the vehicle and land roughly on the pavement.”
Another struggle ensued after the boy regained consciousness, Kersten said. The officer placed his fist on the boy’s throat again “while he was fully restrained in handcuffs.”
The officer failed to report that he had applied pressure to the boy’s throat. Kersten called this a “glaring omission.”
The investigation was launched on June 28, a day after the incident, when a lieutenant reviewed the training officer’s use-of-force report and body-camera footage.
A deputy chief also reviewed the footage and found that the officer’s actions violated department policy, according to Kersten.
“The fact that [the officer] did these things in the presence of a probationary police officer and while acting as a field training officer is especially alarming,” Kersten said.
The officer has been on the force since 2014 and earns an annual salary of $111,480. He has submitted at least 10 use-of-force reports and has been the subject of five complaints, one of which was sustained, according to a misconduct database maintained by the Invisible Institute.
Kersten noted that he has previously faced minor disciplinary action for leaving two arrestees unattended — “misconduct he appears to have repeated in this case.”