Justice. Elderly Woman With Dementia Awarded $3 Million For Cops Breaking Her Arm

This is a real feel good story. This is the best thing that has happened since Derek Chauvin got convicted. Last April a 73-year-old woman with dementia and sensory aphasia, which impairs her ability to understand and communicate, was accused of shoplifting $13.88 worth of merchandise from a local store in Loveland, Colorado. Two cops found the woman walking home and accosted her. The male cop apparently enjoyed showing off for the female cop and he said, “Wait for the pop,” when he dislocated Karen Garner’s shoulder, after throwing her to the ground and breaking her arm. That woman was just awarded a $3 Million verdict, which will be used to pay for round the clock dementia care. New York Times:

“The settlement with Karen Garner will help bring some closure to an unfortunate event in our community but does not upend the work we have left to do,” he said.

Both Ms. Garner’s lawsuit, which claims violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the release of the police body camera footage in April reverberated through the city, prompting multiple investigations, disciplinary action against the officers and scrutiny of the Police Department’s use-of-force and training protocols.

The two officers who arrested Ms. Garner, along with a community service officer who booked her and allegedly denied her medical care, resigned in April. Two of the officers now face criminal charges: Austin Hopp was charged with assaulting Ms. Garner, and Daria Jalali was charged with not intervening in a case of excessive force or reporting it, prosecutors in Colorado said in May. […]

Another video, also released by Ms. Garner’s lawyer this spring, showed officers laughing at footage of Ms. Garner’s arrest. “I love it,” one officer says. “This is great.”

“There is no excuse, under any circumstances, for what happened to Ms. Garner,” the Loveland police chief, Bob Ticer, said in the statement.

Ms. Schielke said in a news briefing on Wednesday that if Chief Ticer resigned within the next month, she would donate $50,000 to an Alzheimer’s or dementia charity of his choice.

I don’t think the chief of police is going to resign. He’s framing this situation as an anomaly in the department and basically saying that the bad eggs are gone and that they were not reflective of the rest of the department. Here’s a video from that time if you had forgotten the sordid details of this incident. This incident was the textbook definition of police brutality, it was so unnecessary and over the top. All the poor woman needed was a ride home and somebody to be her guardian. She didn’t need a couple of cops who acted like jackals and made the public street their personal jungle.

To add insult to injury they laughed at the body cam footage.

A last point to be noted here, and Ms. Garner’s lawyer made it, is that the police were hoping that she didn’t have strong advocates. For each incident like this one, how many hundreds or thousands take place, involving the poor and people of color, who have no way to retain an attorney and get justice?