If you saw a man beating another man on the street, you’d probably call the police.
But what if the man doing the beating was himself a police officer?
Maybe you’d get your video camera. That’s what one unnamed bystander did on Nov. 27, capturing an arrest on Rifle Street in Springfield. The resulting video (posted at MassLive.com) shows police apprehending Melvin Jones III, a Springfield resident, during a traffic stop. The video, shot from across the street, is grainy, and it’s hard to make out a lot of what the officers are saying. But one detail stands out clearly: the repeated flash of a shiny object—a metal flashlight, it turns out—wielded by an officer, who strikes Jones over and over again.
A Jan. 7 Springfield Republican article showed two photos of Jones—one taken by police after his arrest, on drug possession and resisting arrest charges; the other from a hospital bed—with a bruised and swollen face. Jones’ father told reporter Patrick Johnson that his son fractured facial bones, broke a finger and is now partially blind in one eye.
“They beat him like a wild animal,” he said.
The officer with the flashlight was Patrolman Jeffrey Asher—the same Jeffrey Asher who in 1997 was taped kicking a suspect named Roy Parker after he had been subdued by other officers.
In that case, Asher was cleared in court of any wrongdoing but was suspended for one year by the Police Commission. A union arbitrator later reduced the suspension to six months, granting Asher $20,000 in back pay.
Asher has faced at least two other brutality charges since joining the force in 1993, both of which ended with the city paying settlements to the complainants. They include the 2004 case of Douglas Greer, a school principal who was allegedly beaten after a group of cops, including Asher, found him sitting in a parked car, unresponsive, and apparently assumed he was on drugs. Greer said he was having a diabetic seizure at the time.
For the past several years, Asher has worked a desk job in the SPD’s records division. On Nov. 27, he was part of a “special detail,” funded by a state grant, that targets crime “hot spots” in the city.
Even without Asher, or the disturbing videos, there are striking similarities between the Parker and Jones cases—starting with the strong racial undertones: Asher is white, Parker and Jones are both black. (So is Greer). In the Jones video, a bystander is heard reporting that one of the cops called the suspect “a fucking nigger.”
It was a group of black clergy, not a racially mixed group, that called for an investigation by the Attorney General. They were joined at a press conference by two of the city’s 13 city councilors: E. Henry Twiggs and Mel Edwards, both of whom are black.
Familiar, too, is the divided public response to the case. Some say the cops were justified in using force, pointing to the allegation that Jones had tried to grab an officer’s gun. More broadly, in a city struggling with street violence, some residents are willing to grant the police wide latitude when dealing with the “scum” that plague their neighborhoods. Both Parker and Jones had police records, and Jones was charged with three felony drug possessions after his Nov. 27 arrest.
To some residents, the Jones incident is yet another example of the SPD turning its back on the behavior of rogue cops in general, and harboring one dangerously hotheaded cop in particular.
Local officials promise a multi-leveled response to the case—an SPD investigation, a review by the District Attorney, the re-establishment of a police review board with the power to discipline officers (the current Community Complaint Review Board, formed when the Police Commission was disbanded in 2004, lacks that power). Those promises, however, are met with skepticism by residents who question their ability to deal with larger problems within the department. Indeed, as the re-emergence, yet again, of Jeff Asher shows, when it comes to the chronic tensions between the SPD and many of its residents—particularly black and Hispanic residents—the city seems to be stuck in a loop.
