BART https://truthvoice.com Wed, 22 May 2019 11:27:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0.2 https://i0.wp.com/truthvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-truthvoice-logo21-1.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 BART https://truthvoice.com 32 32 194740597 Slain BART Cop Told Wife to Sue if Anything Happened to Him https://truthvoice.com/2015/06/slain-bart-cop-told-wife-to-sue-if-anything-happened-to-him/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=slain-bart-cop-told-wife-to-sue-if-anything-happened-to-him Fri, 05 Jun 2015 11:27:14 +0000 http://truthvoice.com/2015/06/slain-bart-cop-told-wife-to-sue-if-anything-happened-to-him/
bart-cop-tom-smith

BART Police Sergeant Tom “Tommy” Smith

BART police Sgt. Tom Smith, frustrated that his department had rejected his requests for more training or the use of its SWAT team during high-risk searches of homes, told his wife that if anything happened to him, she should “sue the s—” out of the agency, her attorneys said Monday.

Specifically, Smith told his wife — fellow BART Officer Kellie Smith — that she should file a lawsuit naming Deputy Police Chief Ben Fairow, whom he said had routinely denied his requests for more training and for tactical teams. Last year, the sergeant was shot and killed — accidentally, authorities said, by a fellow officer who suddenly encountered him as they searched a small Dublin apartment.

The lawsuit Kellie Smith filed on Friday came a day after she wrote a letter to the BART board of directors and Police Department managers, saying the litigation came only after her attempts to “confidentially address my concerns” failed. A veteran of the force for nearly 20 years, she said she wrote the letter “with deep regret and a heavy heart,” noting that she has “deep loyalty to BART PD and its officers.”

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, says Fairow “denied training and denigrated officers when training and/or involvement of tactical teams were discussed,” saying that it was all “bull—” and that officers were “pussies” because they had “training like this in the police academy.”

“As a result of these repeated denials, my husband said to me, ‘If anything happens to me, I want you to sue the s— out of BART and Fairow.’ ” Kellie Smith wrote in her letter. “My husband’s words will stay with me forever. I cannot let this situation and his concern for his fellow officers go unanswered.”

On Jan. 21, 2014, BART police Officer Michael Maes mistook his supervisor for an armed suspect during the search of the small Dublin apartment, authorities said. The officers had failed to study the circular floor plan before the search, and suddenly encountered each other in a back room.

The suit seeks unspecified damages and an injunction barring BART from “forcing employees to perform tactical operations without having the requisite training” when there is a safety risk. It names the transit agency, Chief Kenton Rainey, Fairow and Maes as defendants. Maes has declined to discuss the case.

In a statement, Dana Fox, an attorney for the transit agency, said, “The BART family continues to mourn the loss of Sgt. Tommy Smith. BART’s top priority is the safety of their officers and the public. The shooting was a tragedy that occurred despite the training the officers had received, which far exceeded (the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training) standards.”

Fairow, a veteran of the Oakland Police Department who joined BART in 2011, has not responded to a request for comment. But in an interview weeks after the tragedy, he said he was “not rejecting” assertions that he routinely declined to deploy the SWAT team. “There very well may have been instances where I said no,” he said.

Smith and Maes were among a group of BART officers who went to the ground-floor, 723-square-foot apartment at the Park Sierra complex on Dougherty Road to conduct a probation search in hopes of recovering stolen property. The apartment belonged to 20-year-old John Henry Lee, a robbery suspect who was already in custody, having been arrested five days earlier after police said he led San Leandro officers on a chase to Oakland in a car stolen from a BART parking lot.

This story originally reported by Henry K. Lee for SFGate

]]>
3477
VIDEO: San Francisco BART Cops Slam Drunk Woman Face-First in Concrete Floor For No Reason https://truthvoice.com/2015/05/san-francisco-bart-cops-slam-drunk-woman-face-first-in-concrete-floor-for-no-reason/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=san-francisco-bart-cops-slam-drunk-woman-face-first-in-concrete-floor-for-no-reason Fri, 01 May 2015 11:21:51 +0000 http://truthvoice.com/2015/05/san-francisco-bart-cops-slam-drunk-woman-face-first-in-concrete-floor-for-no-reason/

sheehan

Bay Area Rapid Transit police face a lawsuit claiming they used excessive force on a drunken woman last year.

The woman claims newly released video of the incident shows officers violently knocking her to the ground for no reason. The encounter allegedly left her with broken bones, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

In the new video, Megan Sheehan can be seen waiting for a train after a night of heavy drinking when BART police officers arrested her.

“I was so embarrassed when I saw the videos. I can’t believe what I was saying. I was just so belligerent and foolish,” Sheehan said.

Despite her behavior, she said, nothing she did justifies what happened next at the Santa Rita jail.

“Don’t touch me like that!” Sheehan can be heard saying in the video. Then she hit the floor.

In his police report, the officer said Sheehan “suddenly turned towards me and began violently punching with a closed fist at my face.” He went on: “To protect myself from her attack … I used an arm-bar take-down and guided her to the ground.”

But Sheehan and her attorneys said footage from surveillance and police body cameras tells another story.

“We don’t see Megan Sheehan trying to punch the officer several times in the face,” her attorney Lizabeth de Vries said. “We don’t see her doing anything that would cause any officer to believe she was an imminent threat that requires this kind of force. … What we see is, without any of this happening, two officers held back Megan Sheehan’s arms and threw her face first to the ground.”

“I had a gash above my left eye, I had a few stitches there, I had four broken bones around my orbital socket, and stitches in my lip, and they knocked out a tooth and chipped another one,” Sheehan said.

Sheehan filed a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming officers used excessive and unreasonable force.

“Whether they thought she was so belligerent and so drunk that she had it coming — I don’t know,” de Vries said.

“I was already arrested, I was already in custody, there was police all around and I don’t know why they had to use that much force,” Sheehan said.

A spokeswoman for BART said the agency would not comment because of the pending litigation.

 

]]>
3318