Long Beach Jail

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.

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.

Police Misconduct

Growing up as a child, I always thought that the police were a service-oriented organization whose purpose was to ensure the safety of civilians and maintain order in our communities.  After all, how many old-time movies showed the friendly neighborhood cop who would help old folks and children cross the street, acknowledge citizens by their first names, bring the milk into the house when they were bringing the rowdy teenage child home before they hurt themselves… etc?  Elementary school seemed to associate the police force (along with firemen, ambulance drivers, the President) with benevolence as well–probably partially the reason that a large percentage of young kids want to be a cop when they grow up.

Unfortunately, my experience growing up has hardly reinforced the idea that police are there to “protect and serve” even though that is the very motto inscribed on their cars and on placards in their stations.  Being what I would describe as a relatively good kid throughout my childhood, I rarely had any contact with police officers when I was young, but some events outside of my control changed that as I got older, and unfortunately I have yet to have what I would describe as a “good” experience with the police.

The worst experience I’ve ever had with the police, however, happened a few months ago in Belmont Shore, Long Beach.  Technically, the experience is ongoing because almost four months later I am still not done dealing with this nightmare.  Having heard through the grapevine that other people have experienced similar treatment by the LBPD, I decided to write this article series to not only call out the department (and the “justice system” of Long Beach) as a whole, but to actually name some names that were involved as I have a large problem with egotistical bullies hiding behind their badges/guns and feel that those involved need to be revealed to the public.

As this is a pretty long story, I’m going to break it into pieces to increase its readability and hopefully its search engine rank.  I’ll start off by saying that I am a young professional, who always abides the law, drinks responsibly and conducts myself in a manner that reflects well upon me and my businesses when I am out and about.  The night I was arrested for no reason, falsely imprisoned by the LBPD and then erroneously charged with a “Drunk in Public” misdemeanor was no exception.

My friend and I took a cab to Belmont Shore from Seal Beach in an effort to avoid driving drunk, which both of us strongly oppose.  Before the cab came, we each had two light beers over the course of an hour and a half beginning at 9:30 PM.  We went to Legends where we each had one beer, and then stopped by Belmont Station where we each had a final beer, for a total of four light beers throughout the night (by the time we left Belmont Station, it was 1:30 AM, so the four beers were had over the course of four hours, or about one beer an hour).  Being 6′1″ at 200 lbs, this is not a significant enough amount of alcohol to inebriate me to a level that is worthy of arrest (or honestly, AT ALL), not to mention I remember every event of the night clear as day and was definitely not drunk.

Anyway, after leaving Belmont Station, we attempted to return to Legends to meet back up with some friends and take a cab back to Seal Beach to end the (what was up to that point) fun and relaxing night.  It was too late to come back in the bar though, so we headed over to Jack in the Box to wait for our friends.  As I learned later from locals who are in the know, this was a huge mistake.  Apparently the fast food restaurant is where the Long Beach Police hang out waiting to pounce on any out-of-town male ignorant enough to come within 100 feet of them.

I emphasized male for a reason; from my experience the department is utterly sexist and has no problem ticketing, arresting or just generally harassing males for things while ignoring similar or even identical actions on the parts of females.  In fact, when they weren’t “hooking and booking” guys they were flirting with girls in a very unprofessional manner.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask that police spend their working hours doing their jobs and keep the socializing and courting efforts to their off-duty hours.

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 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.

Just use this code when prompted to while signing up–it works till August 2010! X23-9EA-78M

Feel free to pass it along to others as well–it has unlimited uses.

I will be writing a full blog post on this incident at a later date, but in the mean time would like to ask anyone who has been unfairly detained by the LBPD in Belmont Shore in the last month or so, to please read this article and contact my attorney at 714-841-3921.  You may be able to get your charges dismissed depending on the circumstances behind your arrest.

Again, please contact my attorney at 714-841-3921 if you or anyone you know has recently been unfairly arrested in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, particularly under the pretense of a “Public Intoxication” charge.

Belmont Shore Public Intoxication Arrests Must be Dismissed | Houston Law of California.