Ben Ballinger

Lt. David Poss of the LBPD

This is the second part of my series on Long Beach police misconduct.  For Part 1, please click here.  For parts 3, 4 and 5, please see links at the bottom.

After arriving at the Jack in the Box near Legends in Belmont Shore, I sat down on the steps near the entrance with a lady friend and was about to make a call to the taxi cab, but was almost immediately approached by Lt. David Poss, who asked me to follow him to his car.  I (in retrospect) foolishly followed him–having done nothing wrong I naively thought nothing of the request–and was asked to breathe into a breathalyser.  Keep in mind, I’d done absolutely nothing wrong at this point and he had no reason to ask me to do this, but I was intimidated and complied with his request.  He looked at the device after I blew, didn’t tell me the result and said to his partner, “Yep, he’s drunk!” and turned me around on his car to slap cuffs on me.

This happened at approximately 1:30 AM.  As stated previously, I had had a total of four beers over the entire night, averaging one beer an hour.  Hardly enough to get my 6′1″, 200 lb. self drunk enough to be in an arrestable state, even if I HAD done anything wrong.

Being essentially sober, I calmly asked him why he was arresting me since I’d done nothing wrong.  The girl I was with also began asking the cop to let me go, asking why he was arresting me.  Lt. Poss didn’t answer either of our questions and instead tightened my cuffs way past what was necessary and then led me to a police van where I was thrown inside with three others.  Less than five minutes later, I was astonished to see my friend I had been with get thrown in as well!  Neither of us had any idea what was going on; my friend said he was grabbed while walking across the street with four other folks, cuffed and thrown in the van without so much as a word said to him.

I continued to call out to the police, asking why I was in the van in the first place and what was going to happen to me.  They completely ignored me, and actually shut the outside door of the van (in addition to the cage door that was already shut and locked).  The fellow next to me was extremely drunk and began to vomit all over the van and my feet.  Since the outside door of the van was shut, there was absolutely no ventilation in the van.  After about ten minutes of near constant arrests outside the van, there were now six of us in the van (all men, of course, from what my friend and I observed, not a single female was accosted, much less arrested that night).  The body heat and overwhelming smell of vomit made each second spent in the van intolerable.  And, unfortunately for us, we were left in the van for over THREE HOURS.

I’m not sure how it’s legal to keep people in a small, hot, fetid, unventilated space for three hours with their hands cuffed so tightly behind their backs that their shoulders are nearly dislocating and the cuffs are leaving bruises on their wrists, but that’s essentially what happened.

Finally around 4:00 AM officer Mark Brunson got in the driver’s seat and his partner got in the passenger seat and they began to drive around looking for more victims criminals. The entire time they were driving, they were taunting us in an extremely immature and unprofessional manner, saying things like, “You fucking idiots are going to have fun tonight!” and “Keep crying, little bitches!”  Police officers should under no circumstances treat their prisoners this way, regardless of what the prisoners allegedly did (or, in my case, nothing at all).

When Lt. Poss arrested me, he forgot to frisk me and thus I still had my phone in my pocket.  While this ended up being beneficial to our situation, it could have been DISASTROUS if I was a violent criminal and had, for instance, a pocket knife in my pants.  I could have murdered everyone in the van before the police even noticed since they were completely ignoring us and had shut all the doors and windows.  In my opinion, that oversight was disgustingly thoughtless and potentially life-threatening.

After forcing myself into various horribly uncomfortable positions that would have made a Chinese contortionist proud, I was able to get the phone from my pocket and dial my friend’s parents.  We tried to tell them roughly where we were–not an easy task while in a windowless van moving around somewhere in Long Beach.  While I was in the middle of talking to them, Mark Brunson noticed that I was on my phone and he violently veered to the right and SLAMMED on his brakes.  There are no seatbelts in the back of a police van, so when he stopped in that fashion, we were all thrown into the front of the cage.  The poor fellow who vomited earlier was flung so hard that his head hit the metal cage and he landed on his knees, face down facing the front of the van.  With his hands cuffed behind his back, he was in a position that it is impossible to get up from without someone else’s help.

Mark Brunson got out of the van and opened the back door.  He yanked the phone out of my hand and handed it to another police officer who had shown up in a different vehicle.  Miraculously, just as this happened my friend’s parents managed to find us and stopped their car behind the van.  My friend’s mom got out and demanded to know what was going on and why her son and his friend were being held in the van.  I could hear Mark Brunson tell her–a frightened, helpless mother who was simply worried about her child–to, “Shut the fuck up and get back in the car,” and then threatened to arrest her if she didn’t.  Last time I checked, that is illegal and you cannot arrest someone for standing on public property and observing police actions.  It was also obviously a horribly-inappropriate way to respond to a law-abiding citizen.

While this was happening, the cop from the other vehicle was screaming at the guy who had been flung into the cage to, “Get the FUCK UP!” over and over, while the fellow was pleading that he wanted to comply but was physically unable to move.  None of us could help him with our hands cuffed, so this went on until the officer got into the van and yanked him up onto the seat so hard that the guy screamed out in pain.

The officer got back out of the van and then motioned for me to get out.  I did so, and he slammed me onto the door of his vehicle, frisked me and threw me inside, where I was transported the rest of the way to jail alone.  The force with which he slammed me into the vehicle was so great that my friend’s mother was still visibly disturbed by it three days later when we were talking about the events of that night.

In Part 1, I introduce my story of mistreatment and misconduct by the Long Beach Police Department. In Part 3 I explain my experience in jail.  In Part 4, I will give my account of the violation of my constitutional rights by the Long Beach courts, and finally in Part 5 I will give my final thoughts on the department’s behavior in the community of Belmont Shore.

If you’ve ever been mistreated by the Long Beach police, I urge you to file a complaint with the department, and name names. This will add to a paper trail that will help in any criminal and/or civil lawsuits that take place for yourself or others. If you ever have the misfortune of having to deal with them in the future, if you only remember to do two things let them be this:

1. Try to remember the names of the officers involved in your arrest or general mistreatment, and file a complaint about them as soon as possible.
2. Don’t say anything during the ordeal… these cops are utterly corrupt and will use every means available, legal or otherwise, to make your life miserable as long as possible.

If you have recently been mistreated by the Long Beach Police Department and are looking for someone with experience in these situations to represent you, please contact my attorney, Gabe Houston, at 714-841-3921 or visit his firm’s website at http://www.hblawyers.net.

This entry was posted Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Fuck My Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.