A Cincinnati Police officer suspended after he tased an 11-year-old girl during an off-duty security shift at a Kroger store will get back pay for that seven-day suspension, an arbiter ruled yesterday.
Arbiter Tobie Braverman oversaw the grievance case brought by the Fraternal Order of Police for officer Kevin Brown, who used a stun gun on the girl, one of a group suspected of stealing food from the Kroger last August.
Braverman wrote that the girl didn’t present a threat to others or to Brown, but could have hurt herself fleeing. He ruled that Brown did not use excessive force, should not have been suspended and is entitled to back pay.
The arbiter found that while Brown violated several other department policy items, including failure to warn the girl before using his stun gun and failure to turn on his body camera, he did not violate the department’s policies on appropriate use of the weapon. At the time, CPD allowed use of stun guns on anyone age 7 to age 70. That policy has since been changed.
The use of the stun gun also seems to have violated department policy because the girl was fleeing Brown at the time of her tasing. Department policy states that “an individual simply fleeing from an officer, absent additional justification, does not warrant the use of the TASER.”
An internal investigation found the incident wasn’t serious enough for the use of the stun gun.
But FOP President Dan Hils said yesterday during a news conference announcing the arbitrator’s decision that Brown had been treated unfairly by Police Chief Eliot Isaac and city elected officials. Hils said the political pressure made it difficult for police investigators to reach fair conclusions in the case because “people shot off their mouths.”
The police union presented evidence showing that stun guns were used on other minors as young as 13 without suspension for the involved officers. In the last five years, about 22 of the department’s roughly 1,400 stun gun incidents involved youth under the age of 15.
The girl cried as firefighters removed the taser barbs from her skin.
“This is why there aren’t any grocery stores in the black community, because of all this going on,” Brown told the girl following the use of the stun gun. Braverman found there was no discriminatory intent in that statement, which some critics have said is racially loaded. Both Brown and the girl are black.
The girl was taken to Children’s Hospital and then released to her parents. The police investigation found that the girl had roughly $50 worth of beef jerky, clothing for infants and candy in her backpack.
In October, the city paid a $220,000 settlement to the girl’s family. Kroger paid another $20,000.
It is not immediately clear how much compensation Brown will receive for his seven-day suspension.
This article appears in Jun 12-19, 2019.
