Criminal law, Society

Fort Collins Police Under Fire After Release Of Brutal Take Down Of Colorado State University Student

A new videotape has raised questions of excessive force in Colorado. The video shows Michaella Surat, 22, was thrown to the ground with such violence that it could easily have caused serious head and face injury. The sorority girl was arrested after she allegedly struck an officer who has responded to a fight involving Surat’s boyfriend.  Surat is a junior at Colorado State University.  The smiling mugshot below does not show any obvious injury to Surat, but the video (also below) is quite chilling.

The incident occurred near Bondi Beach Bar in Old Town Fort Collins. Surat tried to leave with her boyfriend but police said that he was not ready to go (but that she was).  She then allegedly “shoulder checked” a bouncer and police officer, which was declared to be a battery.  The description of the “check” does not sound particularly serious but it turned quite serious in the following moments.  Surat faces charges of third-degree assault and obstructing a peace officer.

Kate Kimble, Fort Collins police spokeswoman, said that the take down was a “standard arrest control” to subdue Surat.  It is hard to see from the video why such a violent move was needed in dealing with the woman who did not appear to present any serious threat to the officers.

This is not the first such controversy in Colorado. In 2015, this eerily similar scene was captured on a security camera:

The concern in such films is that a take down can be used to cause serious injury while justifying the act as a standard arrest move.  Particularly when the suspect is not a serious physical threat, legitimate questions are raised about both the means and the motivation behind the level of force used in the arrest.

What do you think?

120 thoughts on “Fort Collins Police Under Fire After Release Of Brutal Take Down Of Colorado State University Student”

  1. Just a little morning story to go with Turley’s post and your morning coffee.

    I was born in a city with a little room known affectionately as “The Gauntlet” in the basement of the Hall of Justice. I never saw the room, but was close with and heard first hand reports from “participants” on both sides, the citizens and the men in blue. I presume other cities had similar rooms.

    Citizens who needed a personality “tune up” were brought to The Gauntlet for their required service. The Gauntlet comprised concrete on six sides, no windows, measured about 12 x 8 with a short ceiling, and had a steel covered drain in the center.

    My friend/coworker once entered The Gauntlet as a young man. He and his friend, whom both lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, enjoyed taunting the police, calling them names, tossing rocks, etc. Persons entering The Gauntlet encountered six larger than average police men, three on each side, each with a rubber hose. My friend showed me the scars on his neck and upper body.

    Strangely, he did not seemed all that shocked and dismayed by his experience. What he exactly told me, in fact, was that his tune up taught him, so that when a police officer later ordered him to “jump,” he immediately started jumping and asked only, “Is this high enough, officer?”

    An ex-police officer from the city confirmed the existence of and operations in The Gauntlet.

    I wonder if the same room is now a safe space for HOJ employees, possibly where LGBTQxxxxxx and other protected classes have small social gatherings to confirm their victim status? This same large city now has entire departments populated almost exclusively by LGBTQxxxxxx. Heteros need not apply.

    Talk about coming full circle…..and please excuse the unintended pun.

    1. Joseph, that is a pretty disgusting story. Thanks for sharing. /sarc

  2. Cops are around “smart mouthed kids”, entitled brats, junkies who spit on them, drunks who get in their face, anti-cop bystanders, and all sorts of irritating, gross people every day.

    I would hope that the police can arrest a girl without throwing her to the ground. I don’t know what police procedure is. I would think a control hold or simply turning her around and cuffing her would suffice. To a bystander like me, throwing a woman down makes more sense if she was fighting really hard instead of just refusing to comply.

    I would be interested to hear from police officers on the page on how they take down small women who are not cooperating but not punching or kicking either.

    1. Karen,

      I no this has nothing to do with this article, but I just noticed that you had asked about clinker in another section of the site.

      My response is below.

      Sorry for the late response. Clinker is the main output of a cement kiln in the process of making cement. Limestone harvested from the quarry is ground to a fine powder where it gets heated. As the limestone (CaCO3) is heated, it drives of a CO2 molecule leaving lime (CaCo). This process is called calcining. The lime is heated and rolled in the kiln to the point that is forms balls or clinker. The clinker is cooled and then ground with other elements in finishing mills to make cement powder. We have 4 finishing mills each run by 4,000 hp electric motors.

      Cement clinker has nothing to do with coal other than coal being the heat source for the kiln.

      1. Thanks, Jim. I love to watch shows about how things are made and the jobs that run the country. That’s my kind of “reality TV”.

        Does producing clinker create respiratory irritants? I’m curious about grinding lime into small particles and super heating it. Do the workers have to wear protective equipment or does it not aerosolyze?

        1. Karen,
          Cement plants are in the business of making dust. We have a saying, “Dust was its purpose, dust was its problem”. The grinding process can be very harmful to ones lungs but if everything is working properly, there is usually no need for masks unless you are doing maintenance or if the dust collection systems are not working.
          Interestingly enough, most people worry about the coal producing CO2 when in reality, the real CO2 producer of a cement plant is the calcining process. If you look at the periodic chart, you will see that CO2 makes up about 44% of CaCO3. So, a ton of limestone from the quarry makes about 880 pounds of CO2.

  3. In both cases, the Officer used excessive force – and deserves to be fired.

    From an NRA Life Member and NRA Certified Firearms Instructor.

    1. That was unreal. Doctor drug off a plane because a flight crew needed to be in Louisville for an early flight? Where, oh where, could United find another plane? He got back on, you know.

  5. The legal answer is that the cop used reasonable force after being battered. The moral/ethical answer is that this bully cop ought to be fired for overreacting to a feeble attempt to challenge his authority. He’s a “hair trigger guy in a slow squeeze job” as my boy scout firearms instructor once said. Smart guy.

    1. Neither of your answers is correct.

      The legal profession is destructive.

      1. Without the legal profession and with your acerbic commentary, you’d have been carted off to some archipelago long ago. Count your blessings. Lawyers are doing what we’ve done for centuries — tempering the passions of the masses and doling out some approximation of justice.

        1. Without the legal profession and with your acerbic commentary, you’d have been carted off to some archipelago long ago. Count your blessings. Lawyers are doing what we’ve done for centuries — tempering the passions of the masses and doling out some approximation of justice.

          I’ve never been arrested and only been admonished twice by a police officer (in traffick, both times), so I’m not a candidate for a penal colony.

          Somehow, we got along passably prior to 1954 without judges dictating social policy (and conspiring with the har-de-har public interest bar to do so). Somehow, Britain gets along without anything resembling BigLaw. Somehow, New York can process a homicide case in 13 months while Arizona will take five years. Oh, and see Mark Steyn’s commentary on his experience of facing civil suits in British, Canadian, and American courts. The notion that whatever is is necessary in legal services is rubbish.

          In this case, we have lawyers who have no experience in day-to-day order maintenance applying the spew of their cogitations. We have lawyers who have no experience running commercial businesses dictating hiring and promotion policies. We have lawyers who have no experience with tenants telling landlords to whom they must rent. We have no-fault divorce because it makes life easier for lawyers.

  6. There appear to be bumps on her head.

    There is no need for this use of force. We should expect better control from officers. That was a very hard slam onto hard pavement. We have become awfully authoritarian, both in law enforcement and what we as citizens encourage to happen, as long as it happens to others.

    Authoritarian people never expect to be confronted by state violence. Therefore, they tend to cheer it on gleefully. Rights belong to everyone and their abrogation should not be a source of dismissal by the population. That is how an authoritarian state flourishes. Just as we see here.

  7. Cases like this also show that the issue of excessive force and trigger happy cops is a larger concern for all people sharing the colors red, white and blue….and not just an exclusively “Black” Lives Matter issue.

  8. Somehow, police have come to believe that overwhelming force is the only force. That the only way to arrest someone is to throw them on the ground.

  9. Cops seem to be trained to be afraid for their lives and how to do violent takedowns. They need more training in how to de-escalate situations and how to take control without violence. There may be a time and place for the violence but this instance wasn’t one of them.

    1. The department supports the officer because that’s what you do when one of your own is under attack and the attack is unjustified.

  12. The cop instigated the violence by shoving her hard in the chair, she was just responding to HIS assault.

  13. The smiling mugshot below does not show any obvious injury to Surat, but the video (also below) is quite chilling.

    Which tells you the officer knew what he was doing and the person who took the video sped up the tempo to make the takedown look more violent.

    Quit trying to tell police officers how to do their jobs. You don’t have any expertise in these matters.

  14. Using a video of a different officer/situation in Colorado Springs to make your case against the Fort Collins officer is something I would expect from a kook blogger trying to incite anti-police fervor, but not from Jonathan Turley.

    1. He’s a complacent haut bourgeois who has no respect for any occupational group not of the professional-managerial stratum and he fancies that public order comes wrapped in a bow. Every society, and especially the one in which we live, has trouble-makers. They need to be dealt with with a certain celerity. What Col. Jessup said applies, “Who’s gonna do it?” “You, Prof. Turley? You, Mr. Groen?”

      We benefit from a police force with elan and high morale, which means we don’t have twits with JD degrees second-guessing everything they do in the heat of the moment.

    2. Jayne He explained that it was a different video, he just didn’t have the link to the other, but here it is…and it’s worse than the first one…

  15. Pretty bad. LEOs sometimes need a refresher course on what it’s like to be $10.00 per hour uniformed security guard with exposed weapon permit at the local construction site or Kroger grocery.

    1. It was totally justified. That officer had no way of knowing if she was carrying a tactical nuclear weapon or worse, a snickers bar. Because what if someone nearby had a severe peanut allergy?

      1. Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustules / Are splurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts / And living glupules frat and slipulate / Like jowling meated liverslime / Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes / And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles / Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t.

  18. She offered violence to a Bouncer and a Police officer She could have been much worse. The arrest may be ‘violent’ by a snowflake standards but she was not injured or even marked Sounds like Justice was served

  19. I think you are on a roll today with your deceptive storytelling. Not only does her mugshot NOT show any “serious” injury, it doesn’t show ANY injury. The girl actually has a smirk on her face. Women want equal rights? This officer used force that I would expect is necessary regardless of gender. How does he know this isn’t some dude that identifies as a woman?

      2. What degree of force is acceptable anymore for law enforcement? What is the red line the LEO’s are able to draw? In sports, ANY player that moves from the verbal to the physical engagement of an official is immediately ejected. However in the life and death world of law enforcement, we have people advocating not only verbal confrontations with LEO’s but physical as well.

    1. These college kids have NO respect for authority. If a policeman told me to “LEAVE”, I would “LEAVE”. As far as I’m concerned, she got exactly what she deserved.

      1. Perhaps not exactly what she deserved, but she’s a post-adolescent dipso engaging in disorderly conduct. Commodious living in urban areas requires the forces of order have a certain franchise to shut these people up, even when they’re handsome suburban redheads and not filthy asylum cases. When you make rapid fire decisions and have to make such decisions, you cannot always precisely calibrate desert.

    2. That is horrifying ! Please, tell that officer come see me! Try to do that to me tough guy! That there officer’s behavior is totally unacceptable! In my opinion only, he needs to be terminated!!!!

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