The Courage of Mitchell Crooks (amatuer videographer)

Under the Rug in Inglewood
A judge wants to seal a settlement in a police-brutality case

Fired Inglewood Police Officer Jeremy Morse appears to be District Attorney Steve Cooley’s problem for now, as prosecutors prepare to retry him on brutality charges in the videotaped beating of teenager Donovan Jackson. Critical mistakes by prosecutors ended with a hung jury last July.

But Morse is also Inglewood’s problem. Costly civil settlements, attorneys’ fees and civil rights lawsuits charging illegal law-enforcement practices continue to plague city officials, who cleared Morse despite repeated complaints for more than two years before the Jackson incident in 2002 forced them to fire him.

One federal civil rights case in particular offers a glimpse into the city’s attempts, and a federal judge’s willingness, to keep Morse and a rash of citizen complaints below the radar. “I went to court, because for the first time I thought someone was listening,” says Patricia Surjue, her voice trembling more than two years after her run-in with Morse. She is referring to a settlement hearing before U.S. District Judge James Otero on October 23. “The court should be a place where dignity is not marred. Yet it seems like a business for everyone involved.”

According to a transcript of the hearing, Surjue agreed that day to settle her lawsuit against the city for $470,000 — more than half of which goes to her lawyers. However, she says she settled under duress after informing her lawyers and the judge she wanted a public trial. The city of Inglewood, which has yet to approve public funds for the settlement, wants her to sign a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from speaking publicly, her lawyer says. Inglewood interim city attorney Emmerline Foote did not return calls for comment.

But Surjue has refused to sign, although the hearing transcript offers Otero the authority to execute the settlement based on her verbal agreement. “When I turned to the law, I was told to keep quiet,” Surjue says, disappointed in her own attorneys and dissatisfied with the process. “I was paralyzed out of fear. I’m supposed to challenge this judge, who was appointed by the president?” Otero did not return calls for comment.



On the night of October 20, 2001, Surjue was in her bedroom on the second floor of her Inglewood apartment when there was a knock at the door. Officers Morse and Bijan Darvish were there. It was time for Surjue’s ex-husband, Steven Surjue, to pick up one of their two sons for his visitation, and he had called the police. Just a day earlier, a different pair of Inglewood officers had visited Surjue at her home without incident in response to complaints from her ex-husband that she was not respecting his visitation rights.

Surjue, 39, is a U.S citizen born in Jamaica. She works for the Department of Homeland Security as an adjudication officer reviewing requests for benefits sought under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Steven Surjue is in the U.S. Army and is now stationed in Iraq.

According to both the police report from that night and Surjue’s complaint filed in U.S. District Court in August 2002, her oldest son, Stephen, age 12 at the time, answered the door and told the officers his mother was asleep. While he went upstairs to wake her, Morse and Darvish entered the apartment.

Surjue’s version of events, which is contained in Judge Otero’s order of September 2 granting summary judgment in her favor, states that as she came down the stairs, she asked Morse and Darvish what they were doing in her house. Her reaction prompted Morse to push her son aside and rush up the stairs toward her, her complaint states. Surjue further alleges that Morse grabbed her forcefully, threw his body weight against her and twisted her arm as he shoved her down the stairs. Otero ruled that Morse and Darvish illegally entered Surjue’s home and illegally seized her in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the California Constitution.

On October 23, he then ordered the city of Inglewood to pay $470,000 to settle the case, which is not yet final. As is usually the case in police-misconduct cases, the city successfully sought Otero’s order to seal a number of documents pertaining to its internal investigation of Morse and Darvish.

The police report signed by Darvish on October 20, 2001, states that Surjue was aggressively flailing her arms and that Morse used a “firm grip” as he escorted her down the stairs. In a declaration filed with the court, Darvish later stated that “Morse lost his grip of Surjue’s arm as she continued to swing her arms. Officer Morse then grabbed Ms. Surjue’s wrists and, out of concern for our safety, the safety of her children and the safety of Ms. Surjue herself, she was handcuffed.” (Darvish was charged in 2002 with filing a false police report in the Donovan Jackson case. He was acquitted last July and remains on the Inglewood force. The same jury deadlocked 7-5 on whether Morse was guilty of excessive force.)



Surjue, who is 5-foot-5 and weighs 125 pounds, told the court she received blunt trauma to her back, buttocks, chest and stomach. She claims that her children were forced to witness her in handcuffs for an hour until Inglewood Sergeant Dennis Brown, a defendant in the case, arrived and searched her house for guns.

Morse at one point was so close to her face, as he allegedly told her to “shut up,” that he spit on her as he told her he didn’t care if “she were the president of the United States; she was going to jail,” according to Surjue’s statement filed with the court on October 16.

According to Surjue’s damage claim, in addition to humiliation and emotional trauma, she suffered a fractured coccyx and has become incontinent. Her children, including the youngest, Gareth, age 5 at the time, an asthma sufferer, remain traumatized, she claims.

“I raise my children to be supportive of the police,” Surjue says. “I never in all my life walked in front of the law. But how can I get my children to adhere to the laws of society after this? What am I to tell a child who sees police on the side of the road and fears for the safety of the person they have stopped?”

After the incident, Surjue was treated in the emergency room at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital and went to the Inglewood police station. There, she said Watch Commander John Knapp, also a co-defendant, told her to go home and forget the whole incident, before reluctantly giving her an officer-complaint form to fill out and advising her to return it only to him, as others would dispose of it.

“I felt like a cockroach,” Surjue says.

By the time the Donovan Jackson case made headlines in July 2002, Surjue had hired Mann & Cook. The law firm submitted a formal complaint to Police Chief Ronald Banks, another defendant, along with Mayor Roosevelt Dorn, on February 6, 2002. On January 28, 2003, Banks informed Surjue that her complaint was unfounded.

His finding was one of 11 such findings by the Inglewood Police Internal Affairs Division regarding complaints against Morse in the 31 months before the Jackson incident, according to documents filed in federal court, which describe complaints ranging from excessive force to harassment to false arrest.

Meantime, according to co-counsel Cynthia Anderson-Barker, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office interviewed Surjue and her oldest son in connection with its investigation of the Jackson incident. Surjue “cooperated fully,” Anderson-Barker says. Yet no criminal charges were brought against Morse for allegedly abusing Surjue.



Surjue says a civil rights lawsuit was her only way to find justice. “I was hoping my case would pave the way to justice for people who because of their social class or economic situation are not believed.”

Once in court, Surjue was disappointed with the way she was treated. First of all, she does not want to remain silent. Anderson-Barker says she has asked the court to lift a confidentiality provision contained in the settlement agreement. She declined to comment further.

But Surjue also wants the public to hear what she has been through. “I urinate on myself,” she says. “I want to be able to stand up and say that’s what [Morse] did to me.”

Above all, she says she worries for her safety in Inglewood and that of her children. She would like to be able to afford to move them, but the settlement she has been offered — $15,000 for each child earmarked for college tuition, $190,000 for her, $250,000 for her attorneys — just won’t cut it, she says.

“I want to take my children out of the place where they were traumatized,” she says. “The concerns I have for my children seem secondary to getting this case off someone’s calendar.”





unite the many,
defeat the few!

City gears up for police trial

Man who filmed arrest tells of his own jail ordeal

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian

The retrial starts today of a former police officer accused of assaulting a black teenager by slamming him on to the boot of a police car, an encounter caught on video and broadcast around the world.

But 18 months after the alleged attack in Inglewood, at the edge of Los Angeles, the only person involved who has been sent to jail is the man who shot the video, who has been accused of being a "race traitor" for exposing what took place.

Mitchell Crooks, a 29-year-old actor, DJ and video-maker, was staying at a backpackers' hostel in Inglewood on July 6 2002 when he heard someone shouting "stop hurting him". He ran outside and started filming.

The images in the car park of a petrol station he captured of Donovan Jackson, 16 at the time, led to a charge of assault against Jeremy Morse, who is to appear in court today. A jury was unable to reach a decision at the officer's first trial in July.

"I don't regret doing what I did," Mr Crooks told the Guardian. "You have to do the right thing regardless of what the consequences."

Mr Crooks, who is from Sacramento and had lived in Los Angeles for four years, saw footage from his two-minute video broadcast on every US news network.

The alleged assault has been likened to the beating of Rodney King by four LA police officers, which was captured on video and led to the prosecution of the officers. Their acquittal in 1992 led to the LA riots in which 55 people died.

Inglewood police were aware someone had shot a video and searched the hotel for it. Mr Crooks said Australian and New Zealander backpackers staying there knew he had the footage but did not reveal his identity, so he was able to get it out to the media. He was arrested outside the CNN offices in LA.

"There was a warrant out for my arrest in connection with drunk driving, hit and run, and petty theft," Mr Crooks said. "I'm not making excuses but it was a fender-bender type of accident and I had pawned a VCR that belonged to me, but they made me look like I was the next worst person to Osama bin Laden.

"I had just arranged by phone with a friend to meet me there with the video so they must have tapped the phones."

Mr Crooks, a slim white man who says his experience has made him more politically involved, said: "I was flown by private jet to Placer county. For my sins, I was put in an all-white jail in an all-white county. It turned ugly real quick for me. I did six months in jail - that's what I owed them - and it was a rough six months.

"I was under lockdown 22 hours a day. There were no minorities in jail and some of the other inmates were saying I was a race traitor and throwing it in my face an awful lot."

After his arrest, he said, interest in the actions of Mr Morse, then 25, dwindled. "The media stop paying attention after they're told that you're a criminal."

After the jury failed to reach a verdict on Mr Morse Mr Crooks joined Inglewood community groups to appeal for calm, as prosecutors were accused of mounting a weak case. One of their witnesses, Commander Charles Heal of the LA county sheriff's department, had told the court he did not think a criminal charge was justified. Another police officer, charged with a lesser offence, was acquitted.

Mr Morse and the other officer are suing the city of Inglewood, claiming they were victims of racial discrimination, having been treated more harshly than a black officer also at the scene, who was suspended for four days.

Mr Crooks, meanwhile, is looking forward to the retrial. "Rodney King was not an isolated incident," he said. "Cops are very afraid of cameras - for good reason. Sometimes I think the situation is a little heavy but that goes with the territory."

Because of his incarceration, he did not meet Donovan Jackson until the last trial. "I got to meet the family a bit later. They have been real sweet." Mr Jackson, who has learning difficulties, is being represented by the high-profile lawyer Johnny Cochran in a civil action against the police.

The selection of the jury starts today. In last year's trial there was only one black juror, from what is a 50% black neighbourhood.

There was a SECOND video obtained by the police officers' attorney. This video was from a surveillance camera at the gas station that shows an angle BEHIND the officers. Donovan, the handcuffed black teen, grabs officer Morse's testicles and squeezes them. This caused Morse to pick Donovan up and slam him onto the police car. Justified use of force under California law. Too bad Mitchell didn't see that before jumping onto his anti-police bandwagon.