The Mesa Police Department in Arizona has a serious violence issue, as affirmed by two newly released body cam videos.
Jose Luis Conde, 23, was a passenger in a vehicle that was pulled over in January. Conde reportedly has a history of drug and firearm charges. Knowing Conde’s history, officers asked him to get out of the car. Police searched Conde and found he was carrying drugs.
The first confrontation between officers and 23-year-old Jose Luis Conde, who has a history with police, begins when Conde is a passenger in a vehicle that is pulled over. Officers are seen patting him down, and one officer feels something he believes is a bag of drugs. Conde turns to look at the officer and soon is on the ground in a scuffle.
An officer punches and elbows Conde repeatedly.
The video is dark, but a voice that appears to belong to an officer says, F*ck you,” Enough,” Eat sh*t” and Quit it.”
Conde is heard saying, Help me,” F*ck you” and Get off of me, dude,” and yelling.
Conde is later taken to the hospital and restrained. When his restraints are removed he attempts to flee, so officers attack him again. This too ends in bloody violence, and with officers making fun of him, telling him to Man up.”
Aw, bless his little heart,” one officer quips sarcastically as he is taken to the scene.
How you doing Good to see you!” he says.
Conde is shown with blood on his head, laying on the hospital floor.
You gotta be a man, man. Man up,” one officer says.
BuzzFeed News reported: According to [Bret] Royle, Conde’s attorney, an officer cracked the back of Conde’s head with a flashlight during the chase, sending him to the ground in a pool of blood. In one clip, a nurse is seen leading police to Conde, who was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and explaining that he had tried to flee.”
According to the police report, provided by Conde’s attorney to The Arizona Republic, an officer wrote that during the struggle at the hospital, “During the midst of this, I observed that Jose had begun bleeding profusely from his head.”
Police chief wants to get in front of somebody else releasing the video as has happened to his police department repetitively.
Royle told BuzzFeed that officers claimed Conde hurt them during the scuffle a claim Royle rejects.
“Their hands and knuckles are cut from punching my client and slamming him into a wall,” he said. “You can hear them in the videos talking about how hard they hit him. It’s laughable they are saying Jose injured them.”
Mesa’s police chief outted itself last week by releasing video footage of the violent takedown of an unarmed Black man. But perhaps the department only acts when it’s in the public eye.
Nik Rasheta, a spokesperson for the MPD, told The Arizona Republic that there had been no internal investigation going on regarding Conde’s arrest and takedown.
“Based on your inquiry, we are researching the incident,” Rasheta told the publciation.
Still, it will take more than transparency to fix a corrupt police department.
In February the department slammed an 84-year-old woman down on the asphalt, rendering her unconscious. The woman, a grandmother who was recovering from her fourth stroke, was left bloodied and bruised. Officers told the woman’s family she slipped” and fell. Only through bodycam footage not officer accountability did the truth come out.
In 2016 an officer shot and killed Daniel Shaver, an unarmed 26-year-old who video footage shows was on his knees and pleading for his life. He was unarmed. Former Officer Philip Mitch” Brailsford said he thought Shaver was reaching for a gun. He was found not guilty by a jury. The footage was not released until after Brailsford was acquitted.
