Constitutional Law, Criminal law

Connecticut Man Accuses Police Of Raiding His Apartment, Punching and Stomping Him, and Then Trashing His Apartment . . . Without Finding Any Drugs

The New Haven Independent has published some disturbing pictures of Tomas Torres who says that police raided his apartment looking for drugs and immediately punched him in the face, stomped on his head, and then laughed at him as they tore apart his apartment. They found no drugs and charged him with no crimes. He was left with bruises and an apartment that was completely trashed.

When asked about the raid, Lt. J. Paul Vance, spokesman for the state police, denied that he had any record of state police action anywhere in New Haven on Wednesday and said the account sounded suspicious.
However, Lt. Jeff Hoffman, who oversees the city’s Tactical Narcotics Unit, confirmed the raid and said that Torres resisted detention when police pulled him back in from a window. After finding no drugs, the officers let him go to the hospital where they doctors determined that his arm was fractured.

Torres is looking for a lawyer and is likely to find some interest given the significant injuries and condition of the apartment. This is a common complaint from citizens who have had their apartments “tossed” by police. While police departments often note that there is a process for property damage claims, the process is often long and bureaucratic. Moreover, small damages like trashing the apartment or walls are difficult to establish and even more difficult to secure damages for in this process.

In this case, Torres says that he did not hear an identification of the officers — a standard practice in a “knock and announce.” Unless police have a no knock warrant, they are supposed to clearly identify themselves. Torres said that he thought drug dealers were breaking into his apartment. The degree of bruising and injury would seem to reflect a significant level of force. Of course, the police need to be heard on the allegations of resistance by Torres. However, the allegations clearly warrant further investigation given these pictures and the medical records. What is also notable is that Torres was not charged with assaulting police officers — a charge that is often filed with limited physical contact.

For citizens in the underclass, such raids are well-known but usually out of the sight and mind of mainstream media. These pictures (if found to be legitimate) offer a rare glimpse into the results of some raids.

Source: New Haven Independent

34 thoughts on “Connecticut Man Accuses Police Of Raiding His Apartment, Punching and Stomping Him, and Then Trashing His Apartment . . . Without Finding Any Drugs”

  1. Anti-drug laws invite police into our homes and lives so that government officials can use them to beat us and abuse us without any accountability to justice.

    Legalize drugs. Standardize them. Tax them to cover their societal and healthcare costs.

    Get the police out of our personal lives and personal decisions.

    Plato wrote that, “Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.”

  3. Homeland Security Grants To Cities Soon To Suffer More Deep Cuts
    Drill

    by Andrea Stone

    First Posted: 12/29/11 12:54 PM ET

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/29/homeland-security-grants-deep-cuts-2012_n_1173373.html

    Excerpts:

    Now, a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, deep cuts in funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) threaten to leave those cities and dozens of other smaller population centers without the money to maintain programs into which the federal government has already sunk millions of tax dollars.
    …

    “UASI funding should be directed to those urban areas at greatest risk, not spread far and wide to satisfy each mayor, governor or congressman’s inherent desire to have the maximum amount of homeland security funding,” said Daniel Kaniewski, deputy director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former official in President George W. Bush’s White House. “The budget reality in Washington requires that scarce federal resources be allocated according to risk profiles, not wish lists.”
    …..

    Before 9/11, counterterrorism was almost exclusively a federal issue. Today, in part due to federal homeland security grant programs like UASI, every state and 22 major urban areas have fusion centers, where analysts from local, state and federal agencies sift through and interpret threat data. Several big-city police departments, most controversially in New York, have set up their own intelligence divisions. The infusion of federal money also has contributed to an unwelcome militarization of police departments, which have bought Army-style armored personnel vehicles to use for crowd control and drug sweeps.
    …

    “Everybody and his brother got a shiny new command vehicle, a communications van, patrol vessels, fire and police boats,” said Eric Holdeman, former emergency manager for Seattle and the surrounding King County. “It’s going to be very hard to sustain a lot of these.”

    “Advocacy for homeland security will continue to dwindle — until the next attack,” he recently wrote. “20 years from now emergency managers will tell their children and grandchildren about the heyday of homeland security funding from 2003-2010. At Christmas they will relate how the money flowed in great streams, nay rivers of funding. There were trucks, mobile command posts, bomb robots, chemical detectors and all sorts of suits. It was a wonderful time of toys for boys.”

  7. I agree with the posters calling for jail time. While hefty settlements should have the effect of curbing such behaviour they are ultimately just another budget item, the cost of which is passed on to the taxpayers. Excellent information from Jill and Anon Nurse.

  9. There needs to be a lawsuit against the state cops for this one. I think the reason they did not file resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, is that they beat him up too badly to take to jail. They would not have admitted him before they took him to the hospital and made an official police report on how the injuries happened. They did not need that, so they let him go so that they can say the injuries happened later.

  12. A soda stream? Is that something like the old seltzer bottles that we saw in movies? I’ll have to look it up.

  13. Your dinner sounds wonderful, Blouise. I cooked a five course meal for our son’s final dinner of this visit. Made sparkling water with the new soda stream he got me for Christmas. He said it is better for the environment than buying imported waters, and he is right.

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