A top federal law enforcement official involved in the decision this month to forcibly clear hundreds of peaceful protesters near the White House was accused as a U.S. Park Police patrol officer nearly two decades ago of conducting unlawful body cavity searches and providing unreliable testimony, according to interviews and court records.
The official, Gregory T. Monahan, now the acting chief of the Park Police, was repeatedly cleared of wrongdoing. He now leads the force that gave the order to use pepper spray and other irritants to carry out a directive to clear Lafayette Square before President Trump’s widely criticized visit to a nearby church on June 1, and he is a key decision maker in the federal government’s response to the continuing protests against police violence.
The episode at Lafayette Square is the latest controversy for the Park Police, which prosecutors and defense lawyers say has a reputation for fostering a “cowboy” culture where rules are not of paramount importance. The Park Police, a force of about 600 officers that is part of the National Park Service inside the Interior Department, has jurisdiction over the nation’s federal parks, including the many that dot Washington as well as some highways surrounding the capital.
If demonstrators continue to gather in the parks around the White House and Washington’s monuments, the Park Police will be the primary force that polices their actions.
In a statement in response to questions about Mr. Monahan, Alexandra Picavet, a National Park Service spokeswoman, said all “the referenced cases were investigated, and the allegations were determined to be unfounded.” She added that all of Mr. Monahan’s actions and testimony were appropriate and that the chief, “throughout his decades of public service as a law enforcement officer, has served with distinction, putting his life on the line to protect citizens in upholding the law.”
Mr. Monahan, 48, joined the Park Police in 1997. He was investigated at least four times from 1999 to 2004 on accusations of conducting unlawful body cavity searches, according to a 2004 letter written by Kenneth L. Wainstein, then the U.S. attorney in Washington, to a defense lawyer in a separate case involving Mr. Monahan. In one of the four cases, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute him; the Park Police cleared him in two others and another investigation was pending at the time.
In a fifth case, a federal judge in Northern Virginia suppressed evidence from the stop of a black motorist whom Mr. Monahan pulled over for a cracked windshield in 2002 on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, a highway near Washington that the Park Police have jurisdiction over. He searched the man, Arrion Ford, for drugs by putting his gloved hand in the man’s buttocks on the side of the busy road, according to court documents.
Mr. Monahan had testified that he did nothing wrong. He said he searched Mr. Ford because he saw him “clinching his buttocks,” suspected he was carrying drugs, patted him down and found a package of crack cocaine. The officer said that during his first six years on the force he had made 500 drug arrests and estimated that in 20 percent of those cases, suspects had hidden drugs in their buttocks.
Mr. Ford gave a different account. He testified that after pulling down his shorts and underwear, Mr. Monahan, with the help of two other officers, “spread my butt cheek, and then he went, excuse me, went to my rectum and retrieved the item, the contraband that he said I had,” according to a court transcript of the suppression hearing.
Judge Gerald B. Lee, in a scathing decision, said he simply did not believe Mr. Monahan’s testimony. Judge Lee said that the search was unconstitutional and emphasized that it took place in broad daylight. The case was ultimately dismissed.
Ms. Picavet said that the Park Police asked federal prosecutors at the time to seek a “reconsideration” of Judge Lee’s decision but that the request was denied. She said that Mr. Monahan later testified in numerous other cases and that “his testimony and actions were found to be credible.”
But on another occasion, Judge Lee, who at the time was sitting in Federal District Court in Alexandria, dismissed another drug case involving a motorist that Mr. Monahan had stopped on suspicion of failing to wear a seatbelt. The judge said he did not find Mr. Monahan’s account of the 2002 episode — which resulted in the arrest of the man, Rasheed McDaniel — to be credible, in part because of Mr. Monahan’s testimony in another case.
“Analyzing Officer Monahan’s demeanor on the witness stand, his testimony about his observations, and considering his previous questionable veracity before this court in another traffic stop on the Parkway, the court finds improbable that Officer Monahan observed a passenger not wearing his seatbelt as the vehicle was traveling past him for a fleeting second at 1 o’clock in the morning,” Judge Lee wrote in a January 2003 decision.
Judge Lee, who is now retired, declined to comment further on the case but said that he stood by the statements he made in court that he found Mr. Monahan to be untruthful.
In all, federal judges suppressed evidence in at least a half-dozen criminal cases during the years that Mr. Monahan patrolled either national parks in Washington or highways under Park Police jurisdiction in Northern Virginia, according to defense lawyers and a review of court filings.
“Monahan had, by far, more cases, thrown out because of police misconduct than any other officer I’ve ever dealt with,” said Geremy Kamens, who heads the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of Virginia and represented Mr. Ford in the 2002 case.
Those allegations were not an obstacle to Mr. Monahan’s ascent. He was promoted to detective sergeant by 2007, captain in 2012, a major in 2015 and assistant chief of police last July. He was named acting chief in September after the previous head of the force, Robert D. MacLean, was promoted.
Mr. Monahan joined the Park Police after getting a bachelor’s degree in business administration from St. Bonaventure University in New York, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2015, his profile said, he earned an advanced degree in public administration from the University of Nebraska-Omaha. The son of a former New York City police officer, he and his family have been active in raising money for a charitable group that supports families of deceased police officers.
Just before he was named acting chief, Mr. Monahan served as the supervisor of the patrol officers at the Presidio, a national park in San Francisco — while largely working from offices in Washington, according to a union complaint against him.
While he was in that post, the union that represents the Park Police accused Mr. Monahan of asking federal prosecutors to dismiss misdemeanor charges against several people accused of assaulting officers in the Presidio. The union filed a complaint with the federal prosecutor’s office in San Francisco about Mr. Monahan, saying he wanted the charges dismissed to curry favor with Interior Department officials.
Charges against the suspects were eventually dismissed. The union’s complaint is pending before the Interior Department’s independent inspector general.
Mr. Monahan has more recently faced criticism for a statement he issued after the havoc this month in Lafayette Square in which he said no tear gas was used on protesters. The U.S. Secret Service, which worked with the Park Police in securing the area, had at first also denied the use of tear gas but later acknowledged that officers sprayed pepper gas on the crowd.
Two Park Police officers were put on administrative duty pending an investigation into allegations they assaulted an Australian TV crew filming the protests in Lafayette Square.
The encounter came three years after a minor traffic accident in 2017 when Park Police officers fired nine shots at close range into the car of a 25-year-old Virginia man, Bijan Ghaisar, hitting him in the head four times. He died 10 days later. The officers claimed that Mr. Ghaisar failed to stop his vehicle.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington investigated but determined it had insufficient evidence to charge the officers. A local prosecutor in Virginia has vowed to investigate the shooting but accused the F.B.I. this spring of withholding hundreds of related documents.
Alain Delaquérière and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
"had" - Google News
June 19, 2020 at 05:55AM
https://ift.tt/37EF4ak
Park Police Head Had Been Accused of Illegal Searches and Unreliable Testimony - The New York Times
"had" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KUBsq7
https://ift.tt/3c5pd6c
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Park Police Head Had Been Accused of Illegal Searches and Unreliable Testimony - The New York Times"
Post a Comment