By Linhchi Nguyen and Esha Kher
SACRAMENTO – After comparing body camera evidence and a police report, a defense attorney here Friday succeeded in getting a judge to examine a city police officer’s files to see if there’s a history of “unlawful detentions and excessive force therein, his history of racial animus, and his history of falsifying police reports.”
Defense Attorney Edward Richter presented evidence to Sacramento Superior Court involving discrepancies between a police report and the associated body cam footage, noting an officer falsified the police report based on his “racial animus” toward the defendant, Andre Gladen.
During this preliminary hearing, Richter pointed out that Sacramento City Police Officer (unintelligible) Bradley, when arresting Gladen, misconstrued the details in his police report regarding his encounter with three African American youth, as well as his interaction with the defendant in which he prevented Gladen from going to work and “unlawfully” detained him.
While Officer Bradley described his own behavior as “relatively polite,” Richter claimed that the body cam footage tells a different story. Accusing Officer Bradley with falsification of his report, Richter filed a “Pitchess” motion to investigate the history of Bradley’s officer misconduct.
The police officer’s altercation with the defendant began when Gladen found him harassing three African American young men.
“Our client saw this and called him out on it. He didn’t want to see that happening,” explained Richter. While the body cam footage didn’t capture this particular moment, it recorded Gladen confronting the officer about his behavior, and Gladen himself confirmed the harassment.
“Officer Bradley then prevented (Gladen) from going to work for over five minutes, despite a request from our client to get out of the way,” said Richter. He added that although his client may have been rude towards the officer, Gladen “was not doing anything remotely criminal,” and “being rude to a police officer is not a criminal offense.”
Although the police report only indicated one instance where Gladen told Officer Bradley to get out of the way, the body worn camera shows Gladen asking him to move nearly four or five times over the course of a five-minute-long detention.
“None of which was detailed out in Officer Bradley’s police report,” Richter stated. “which we view is a falsification of that police report as it is a blatant lie of omission of what occurred.”
He added, “We believe Officer Bradley was doing this based upon racial animus, due to the nature of what our client said he saw, due to just the nature of the stop itself, and the fact that there was no real basis for it.”
Therefore, Richter contended that Gladen’s arrest is “obviously an unlawful detention,” since a charge for resisting arrest is only valid if the officer was acting within a lawful capacity.
He requested a warrant for the defense to look into three types of misconduct by Officer Bradley, including his history of “unlawful detentions and excessive force therein, his history of racial animus, and his history of falsifying police reports.”
Deputy District Attorney Angel Solis asserted that the reason why the defendant was lawfully detained was because Officer Bradley was being “yelled at aggressively ” and “being accused of doing all these things,” despite Bradley trying to calmly explain what was going on. This, DDA Solis said, led Bradley to begin “an investigation” because of the defendant being abusive toward the police officer.
Solis concluded that “we don’t really think there’s a big difference between body cam and police reports.” While the defense may think that the police officer is racist, Solis said that it was “very clear why this defendant was stopped.”
While Judge Steve White sided with Solis, saying that he didn’t believe he was aware of any major discrepancies between the police report and the body cam footage, he admitted that he wouldn’t be able to speak on the credibility of Officer Bradley’s harassment toward the African American individuals, which happened prior to Gladen’s detainment and was not captured by the body cam.
“That would be the one area where you’re saying that the officer is being dishonest, that I can’t tell you that he wasn’t being, because that footage wasn’t on there,” Judge White said.
Because the standard for credibility of evidence is set low in requesting a warrant, the defense is only required to prove that the officer misconduct could have occurred. As Richter stated, “whether our evidence of what occurred is actually true or not, or credible or not…is something to be determined at a later proceeding.”
Judge White agreed with this point, and he told Richter that he “barely made it over that threshold, noting that when he watched the body camera footage, he personally saw the police officer exercising restraint and “exhibiting none of the issues that (Richter) was constituting in the defense.”
However, he ultimately granted the defense the motion in this case because “a tiny subset of (their) argument relates to something that is not on the camera and arguably checks the criteria for review.”
(Note: Officer Bradley’s first name was unintelligible on the livestream, but there is an SPD officer, Michael Bradley, who was sued in 2019, accused of false arrest and violation of civil rights. That “Bradley” also had a problem related to his body camera and unlawful detainment – that defendant spent an extra month in jail when Bradley didn’t turn in his video for a month. When the DA finally received Bradley’s video, the charges against the defendant were dismissed – the defendant was Latino. The Vanguard is investigating if the Bradley in that lawsuit is the one in the current case. See: https://davisvanguard.org/2019/05/wrongful-arrest-leads-to-lawsuit-as-police-arrest-innocent-man-on-gun-charges/).
Linhchi Nguyen is a fourth year at UC Davis, double majoring in Political Science and English. She currently lives in Sacramento, California.
Esha Kher is an undergraduate student at UC Davis studying Political Science and Computer Science hoping to pursue a career in corporate law. She is passionate about legal journalism and political advocacy that provokes new perspectives and sparks conversation among the public. When she is not reporting for The Davis Vanguard, Esha is either trying out a new YouTube workout or reading a book on late modern philosophy.
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