The FBI will be taking the lead in the investigation of a 2014 Taser incident in the Sitka jail, police chief Sheldon Schmitt said Monday.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 3, Schmitt announced he had asked Alaska State Troopers to investigate the tasering of a Sitka teenager in 2014, and on Monday he said he has received word from Col. James Cockrell, director of the troopers, that the Anchorage-based FBI would be taking the lead and working with AST.<\/p>\n
The police chief said he made the request because of the community\u2019s concern about a YouTube video of an altercation involving three local police officers and a prisoner in the Sitka jail.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt it would be prudent to have an outside source take a look at this incident,\u201d Schmitt said. He said he conducted his own review in the days following the September 2014 incident, and had concluded that \u201cwhile it didn\u2019t look good,\u201d it didn\u2019t violate department policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cBased on what the public concern was I felt it would be prudent to have an outside agency take a look at it and I welcome that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While the officers\u2019 actions \u201cwere not outside policy,\u201d Schmitt said he issued a \u201cdirective that the drive stun use of Taser (is) not encouraged.\u201d<\/p>\n
The term \u201cdrive stun\u201d refers to holding the Taser against the body of the person to be shocked. With another setting, the Taser fires tiny darts to apply a shock to someone not in physical contact with the user.<\/p>\n
The police chief said the outside review of the Taser incident is the third time in Schmitt\u2019s 12 years with the department that he has asked for outside help from the troopers to help investigate an incident, and the first time in a \u201cuse of force\u201d situation.<\/p>\n
This latest case pertains to the September 2014 incident involving 18-year-old Franklin Hoogendorn, a student at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, who was arrested in downtown Sitka for alcohol-related misconduct and taken to the Sitka jail.<\/p>\n
The police department\u2019s own holding cell video recorded Hoogendorn resisting attempts by three officers to remove his clothes, which were to be replaced with jail-issue clothing. The video shows the officers wrestling with Hoogendorn as they take off his clothes down to his undershorts. During the struggle, one of the officers Tases Hoogendorn on the leg several times.<\/p>\n
Schmitt said Monday he didn\u2019t know when the investigation would start or whether it had already begun, but said his department is ready to answer the investigators\u2019 questions.<\/p>\n
He said he doesn\u2019t know what to infer from the involvement of the FBI, but noted that the federal agency has assisted in a number of local issues around the state, including drug investigations through their Safe Streets Initiative.<\/p>\n
City Administrator Mark Gorman said the city is taking the situation \u201cvery seriously and obviously so have the state and federal agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the city is working to be as \u201copen and transparent as possible\u201d with the public in regard to the Hoogendorn incident.<\/p>\n
But while consistently affirming that the officers\u2019 actions fit within department use-of-force procedures, the city staff has not released those procedures to the public.<\/p>\n
The Sentinel has asked the city to release a copy of the department procedures but Schmitt said it is not department policy to open that information to the public.<\/p>\n
Other municipalities make the relevant policies easily accessible, including the City of Anchorage, which within the past year posted 604 pages of police department policies on the city\u2019s website.<\/p>\n
Gorman said he believes there will be \u201ca conversation\u201d about doing the same in Sitka.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a healthy debate in City Hall. I believe we should give the public absolutely everything,\u201d he said, \u201cand there\u2019s a counter view to that: That we should not give the public absolutely everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schmitt said it\u2019s more common for procedures not to be publicly disclosed out of concern that it would make it harder for officers in the field. Gorman said he understands there may be \u201ctrade secrets that we don\u2019t want out in the public,\u201d but he also acknowledged that opening up the policies and procedures may help the public better understand the 2014 Tasing incident, as it did for him when he read them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would agree that I think if they read the policy, it\u2019s not very defined, but they would see they could use the non-lethal weapons in this case … The one issue where it falls short is it does not specify how many times can somebody be drive stunned and it not be excessive. It doesn\u2019t get into that issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
The online Anchorage Police Department policy on Tasers says that \u201cthe officer shall energize the subject the least number of times and no longer than reasonably necessary to accomplish the legitimate operational objective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hoogendorn was shocked at least five times, according to some reports. The Anchorage policy does not put a number on what \u201cthe least number of times\u201d is, and Gorman said Sitka\u2019s policy doesn\u2019t either.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt allows for (use of the Taser) but it doesn\u2019t say if eight drive stuns were excessive,\u201d Gorman said.<\/p>\n
The administrator did say that the policy requires an internal review of all use-of-force incidents. In the Hoogendorn case that led to changes in procedure.<\/p>\n
The policy of drive stunning \u201cis not encouraged\u201d through a directive from Schmitt, and Alaska Public Safety Training Academy Commander Chad Goeden said the technique is \u201cdiscouraged\u201d in training of Alaska police officers. Goeden said the practice was deemed ineffective compared to the Taser\u2019s other function, which fires two probes into the suspect and runs a current between them.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a last resort and widely discouraged because it is not as effective as the probes,\u201d Goeden said.<\/p>\n
The officer who Tased Hoogendorn came from New Mexico and was not trained at the Public Safety Academy. That officer also had a history with a previous incident in New Mexico in which a suspect died after being Tased. The officer was exonerated in that case and while he no longer works at the Sitka Police Department, Schmitt has said he left in good standing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The FBI will be taking the lead in the investigation of a 2014 Taser incident in the Sitka jail, police chief Sheldon Schmitt said Monday. On Nov. 3, Schmitt announced he had asked Alaska State Troopers to investigate the tasering of a Sitka teenager in 2014, and on Monday he said he has received word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-19540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19540"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=19540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}