Ben Ballinger

This is the third part of my series on Long Beach police misconduct.  For Part 1, please click here.  For parts 2, 4 and 5, please see links at the bottom.

After getting to the police station, I was taunted by both the cops who were booking us and by the cowards behind the glass responsible for the booking papers.  One of the guys was around 50 years of age, and literally laughed at me and called me a “fucking faggot” when I asked to go to the bathroom and was refused by officer Mark Brunson.  At this point I was extremely frustrated with the way they were treating us all, and began to complain about how they were acting.  The same officer who slammed me into his car came up and whispered in my ear, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, we have an isolation chamber that we’re going to throw you in.  We will strip you of your clothing and there is nothing in the room but a concrete floor with a hole in the middle of it for you to shit in.  Our station only gets 2 out of 5 stars for its cleanliness, and we’re DAMN proud of it!”

Having never been in jail before, and having no more doubts that the police would do anything they wanted, regardless of the legality of it or not, I shut my mouth to avoid any beatings or worse.  I was told to breathe into a breathalyser again, where I allegedly recorded a .13 BAC.  After getting home and researching BAC levels, I came to this website which described a .13-.15 BAC as:

“Gross motor impairment and lack of physical control. Blurred vision and major loss of balance. Euphoria is reduced and dysphoria (anxiety, restlessness) is beginning to appear. Judgment and perception are severely impaired.”

Keep in mind this was 4:30 AM, so in addition to only having four drinks the entire night, I hadn’t even been drinking for more than three hours!  I have gone through college and like most others, have experienced various levels of drunkenness.  I can honestly say that I was stone-sober by the time I was told to breathe in that breathalyser.  There is no way that I was more than .01 BAC at that point, which would be like if I drank 3 sips of beer.

In college, I more than once finished an 18 pack of beer in under two hours, so if 4 beers over the course of 7 hours (9:30 PM – 4:30 AM) netted me a BAC of .13, then basic math would lead me to conclude that after an 18 pack in 2 hours I would have a BAC of OVER 2.04.  To put that in perspective, .40 BAC and up reportedly has the following affects:

“Onset of coma, and possible death due to respiratory arrest.”

BAC of 2.04 would mean that there was more than twice the volume of alcohol in my veins than blood and I would have won the world record for the highest BAC ever recorded by a factor of 3.  This is obviously utterly freaking ridiculous and clearly proves that their breathalyser was extraordinarily inaccurate.  Apparently one’s BAC has to be over a certain amount to make it legal to be booked into jail under the pretense of Public Drunkenness, so I have my suspicions as to why the breathalyser overestimated my BAC by around 1,300%.

At this point, my knowledge of the relative time of each event gets hazy because there were no clocks in the entire jail (for what reason, exactly?  Is it important that prisoners don’t know what time it is?  More likely, just another way to torture them.) so I’ll have to go by my instinct and the few times I was able to see the time, which was thanks to a clock tower outside that I could JUST see if I smashed my face into the bars in the back of one of the jail cells as hard as I could.

Those of us who were in the van were all brought into the jail at the same time, yet none of us were processed at the same time.  The first person was processed around 6 AM, I myself was processed around 7:30 AM and my friend wasn’t processed until around 5 PM.  This makes no sense to me… I would think the proper procedure would be to book everyone at the same time, right when they get in the jail, and then put them in the cell and that’s that till they’re ready to be released.  Instead, they were pulling random people from the group and putting them in random cells–sometimes I was by myself for hours, other times with half my original group and another group, at other times just me and my friend (we were left in a cell with no benches and lice crawling around on the floor for 5 hours for no apparent reason whatsoever, while the rest of the group was taken to the main cell with a television, seating and cots).

After having my finger prints and picture taken as if I were a violent criminal, I was put into a random cell and left for 2 hours.  It was right next to the sheriff’s desk and I politely asked the sheriff at the desk if he could provide me with some information about what I should expect process-wise and when I could expect to be released.  He told me that if I didn’t stop asking questions, I would be kept in jail for “as long as they felt like it” and then he simply carried on chatting with another guard and paid me no attention.  I was let back into the original cell that had no benches around 9:30 AM, where I stayed with my friend for 5 hours as I said before.   While in there, I could hear the air conditioning start blowing at full blast and the room got EXTREMELY cold.  Having been up all night, with no warm clothes and no food in my body, I had trouble keeping myself warm and began shivering uncontrollably.  I could barely tell my friend what was going on and I curled into a ball on the ground to try and keep from catching hypothermia.

This next part I am not making up.  The little slot in the door opened and I was ordered off the floor and to the door, where a sheriff was with a nurse.  The nurse asked me to put my hands through the slot and do a few movements for her while she examined me and asked me questions like “Do you have an addiction to alcohol?”  I replied that I didn’t, and in fact wasn’t even slightly drunk and was shivering not from ALCOHOL WITHDRAWAL (seriously?!) but because someone had purposely turned the air conditioning on and it was about 35 degrees in the room.  She completely ignored what I said and the slot was closed.  The air conditioning remained on for the next two hours until I was transferred to the main cell, which they were thoughtful enough to have me share with prisoners accused of felonies, including aggravated assault, armed robbery and I’m sure, much worse.

To describe the jail conditions as “utterly repulsive” would be an understatement.  The drinking fountains are right on top of the toilets and when you press the button for the water, it flushes the toilet as well.  This is completely disgusting and I had no interest in drinking from something that would likely give me e-coli poisoning… there was no reason they couldn’t have put a drinking fountain NEXT to the toilet instead of making it part of the same structure, but that’s how it was.  They only served milk to drink when they fed us, which, when you’ve been up all night and have not had any water to drink in hours is NOT what you want to drink.  The floors were grotesque and covered with ants, lice and who knows what other types of filth.

I managed to get a hold of my step mother, the only landline phone number I could recall from memory (the jail phones are collect calls, so they don’t work to cell phones) and talked to her a number of times.  After telling her my situation, she called the jail and asked when I would be released.  They told her that I would be released at 10:00 AM, which was a complete and utter lie, as I was not released until over 12 hours after that.  My friend’s parents apparently were sitting in the waiting room the entire time we were incarcerated and the police lied to them as well, telling them fake times and making up new times every time the original time came to pass.

While in the main cell, I passed the time by chatting with some of the other inmates, who seemed intimidating at first but were actually pretty nice fellows.  They asked me why I was in jail, and I told them that I honestly didn’t know, and that I was stopped in Belmont Shore.  They interrupted me and asked if I was grabbed near Legends, and I said as a matter of fact I was.  They laughed and said that they had been locked up in the Long Beach jail a number of times and every time had talked to people who were hooked and booked for no reason whatsoever, and that they figured it was Long Beach’s way of making money, since California’s government was bankrupt and likely weren’t providing the same level of funding to the city as before.  While this made sense to me at the time, it wasn’t until my battle with the justice system that it became clear that this was in fact, EXACTLY what was going on.  But more on that in Part 5.

Lights were turned off and we were ordered into the sleeping cells around 8:00 PM, and I had no idea if I was going to be released or have to stay there the entire weekend, or longer.  The worst part was I had a work obligation that day and I wasn’t even able to notify the client that I would not be able to make our meeting, which thankfully, he was understanding about later when I told him the story, but it could have been disastrous for my business.  It’s unfortunate that during these hard economic times, hard-working, honest folks like myself can have their business efforts ruined by the very government that supposedly was built around the values of “chasing the American Dream.”  Right.

Finally, at 10:45 PM my name was called and I was taken downstairs to get my belongings and leave that Hell-hole.  My friend’s name was not called, so even though we arrived together we did not leave together, and I had no idea if he would be getting out that night.  While we were going down the elevator, the sheriff we were with stopped at the 1st floor and was about to take us off, when another officer came into the elevator and told him to keep going down to the basement, where we were originally brought in.  I later learned that they usually release the inmates from the first floor and they go out the front door, but for some reason I was released out of the basement, and the sheriff led me all the way under the parking structure and let me out of a gate on the side street.  My friend called me about 15 minutes later and told me he was released in the same manner, and we realized they had done that because his parents were waiting for us in the lobby and would have asked why they were lied to repeatedly about our release.

In Part 1, I introduce my story of mistreatment and misconduct by the Long Beach Police Department. In Part 2, I discuss the events of my arrest and the horrible mistreatment I received at the hands of my arresting officers (in particular Mark Brunson and David Poss) after arriving at the Jack in the Box on 2nd St.  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 25th, 2010 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Fuck My Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.