Keith McKenzie heard an explosion and ducked into a closet behind a pile of clothes. It was the Orlando Police Department’s SWAT team, serving a search warrant, looking for drugs and using a “flash bang” as a diversion.
They didn’t realize it then, but they had the wrong man cornered.
Officers repeatedly ordered McKenzie to step out of the closet, but he refused, so officers went in after him. McKenzie wound up face-down on the floor with broken teeth and a bloody forehead.
McKenzie is not alone. The police department used force 517 times in 2015 to detain or arrest people. That number is down nearly 16 percent from the year before.
Still, OPD officers continued to use force at a rate far higher than some other police agencies, according to an Orlando Sentinel review of agency data and public records.
The city and its insurers agreed to pay $940,000 in 2015 to resolve excessive force lawsuits and claims, according to city and court records, all from incidents that happened in previous years.
That’s three times what they paid the year before. It’s 20 times what the Orange County Sheriff’s Office — which has twice as many officers and makes far more arrests — paid for similar claims last year.
In addition, the city or its officers were named in at least 13 new police brutality lawsuits last year, the same as the year before, records show.
Police Chief John Mina said excessive force is not a problem at his department.
“I think our officers have been trained very well in our department, and I don’t think that we use force more than other departments,” he said in an interview Sept. 21 when asked about the Sentinel’s findings.
Experts said the drop in Orlando’s 2015 force numbers was good news.
“One would say a drop, any drop, is encouraging,” said Kenneth Adams, a criminal justice professor at the University of Central Florida. “The $64 question is why. Why is it going down?”
Mina attributed the drop to better training, especially sessions that teach officers how to deal with people who are mentally ill, and the prevalence of video and body cameras.
“Many times just talking to the person, trying to de-conflict the situation will result in a peaceful resolution,” he said. “Unfortunately that’s not always the case.”
The department investigated at least 12 complaints that its officers used excessive force, physically abused people or abused prisoners in 2015, it reported.
It cleared all but one officer, Dennis Turner, a 20-year department veteran who used a Taser on a man five times. The last two jolts came after the suspect was on the floor and had stopped resisting. Turner was given a written reprimand for excessive force.
Officers named in this story declined to comment, according to a statement from the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police.
New data
In November 2015, the Orlando Sentinel published the results of a 10-month investigation, showing that the rate at which Orlando officers used force far outpaced other agencies for the five-year period that ended Dec. 31, 2014.
The Sentinel has updated its analysis with data from 2015. Its new findings, based on data from the police department:
* Orlando officers used force in 517 incidents in 2015, down from 612 the year before and from 745 in 2012.
* Officers injured 236 suspects last year, compared with 278 in the year before.
* Fifty-seven percent of those who were subjected to force in 2015 were black vs. 54 percent the previous year. Eighty-three percent of the time, the lead officer who used force in 2015 was white, the Sentinel found. Sixty-three percent of the department’s officers are white.
* One out of every five force incidents took place downtown between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.
Lawsuits and payouts
The city and its insurer agreed to pay $940,000 last year to resolve at least eight excessive force claims, all of them for incidents that happened in previous years, according to city and court records.
In 2014 the city paid $320,000 to settle at least seven claims, records show.
In contrast, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office reported that last year it settled two excessive force claims for $45,000.
For Orlando and its insurer the biggest settlement in 2015 was $760,000 to the family of Karvas Gamble Jr., a 19-year-old who was inside a building on Jan. 16, 2013, when an eight-man OPD drug squad surrounded the building at dusk. Detective Christopher Bigelow shot and killed Gamble through a window, saying he was reaching toward a gun.
City excessive force settlements typically included — as did the Gamble case — a clause spelling out that the city and officer did not admit wrongdoing.
City Attorney Mayanne Downs said the city prevails in most of those lawsuits, and when it chooses to settle, usually makes a payout that’s “very, very small.”
There also was a new crop of excessive force lawsuits filed in 2015: at least 13 people sued the city, police department or individual officers, accusing them of excessive force, city and court records show. Most were for incidents that happened in earlier years.
The city and its insurer have settled at least five of those.
Targets of force
OPD officers used force on people ranging in age from 11 to 83 last year.
The 11-year-old was an autistic boy at Glenridge Middle School who was Tased two or three times, according to witness accounts in police reports, at least once after he was on the ground.
The child, who was 5-5 and weighed 165 lbs, had been aggressive much of the day and was swinging at staffers and Cpl. Jesse Day, the OPD officer assigned to the school, so Day decided to handcuff him and take him to a mental hospital, according to records.
Mina said Day’s actions were justified.
The 83-year-old suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, family members said. He had swung a lamp at them and refused to let them leave the house.
Officer Eduardo Sanguino pushed him to the ground when he tried to pull away, according to a department report.
The man suffered scrapes and was taken to the hospital for psychiatric treatment.
Managers concluded that Sanguino had violated no department policies.
‘My hands are up’
McKenzie, 30, was at a friend’s home June 29, 2015, watching baseball on TV when he heard a boom.
He thought it was a home invasion, he said, so he hid in a bedroom closet.
But it was SWAT officers, serving a search warrant for drugs and looking for a man who they believed had fired a gun at officers several days earlier, Mina said.
McKenzie was not the shooter, Mina said, “but they had no way of knowing that.”
A different SWAT unit, serving a search warrant at the same time on a different apartment in the same complex, found that man but did not file charges or arrest him.
In the apartment where McKenzie was hiding, officers saw a handgun on the bed, about three feet from the closet, according to a report. McKenzie said he heard them order him to put his hands up.
“I’m saying ‘I’m in the closet, I’m in the closet,'” McKenzie said. “‘My hands are up.'”
Officers Charles Holmes and Hank Wong forced McKenzie out of the closet and to the floor, according to agency paperwork.
In written paperwork, McKenzie says one of the officers jammed the muzzle of the gun into his head, but officers say that’s not what happened. McKenzie was taken to Florida Hospital with three chipped teeth.
Wong told a sergeant that he kicked McKenzie in the chest but did not hit him in the head with a gun.
Holmes said he didn’t hit him with a gun, either. Holmes said that once McKenzie was on the ground, he put his leg across the suspect’s shoulder to make him lay flat.
Mina said it is likely that McKenzie suffered the injuries while he was on the floor.
McKenzie was charged with resisting arrest and a variety of drug offenses, but video showed that someone else had sold the drugs.
He passed a lie detector test that was arranged by his defense lawyer, saying that he was innocent, had been hit in the head with the muzzle of an officer’s gun and was kicked in the head by an officer after McKenzie was already handcuffed and face-down on the floor.
Prosecutors dropped the case against him, and he has retained a civil attorney and plans to sue, alleging excessive force, he said.
Holmes and Wong were cleared of wrongdoing by their supervisor.
McKenzie had four prior arrests as an adult, according to state and court records, including two for drug charges and once for resisting arrest.
Other departments
Different police agencies define force differently.
Orlando counts tackles, hits and kicks, use of chemical spray, use of a Taser, dog bites, baton strikes, use of stop sticks and “other.” The count does not include shootings.
OPD used force in 4.85 percent of its arrests last year, as counted by the FBI in its Uniform Crime Report.
* Police in Baton Rouge, La., used force in 2.2 percent of their arrests, as counted by the FBI. That city has about the same population and minority percentage as Orlando and has a police department that’s about the same size.
* Norfolk, Va., another similarly sized city with a police department that’s about the same size, used force in 4.2 percent of its arrests, as counted by the FBI.
* Tampa has a population that is 50 percent bigger than Orlando’s. It has 25 percent more police officers, and it arrests three times as many people, according to the FBI.
It also counts far more categories of force than OPD, for example, if an officer points his gun at a suspect, in Tampa, that’s counted as an act of force. When those extra categories are stripped out, last year its officers used force in 2 percent of its arrests, as counted by the FBI.
OPD and the local police union dispute the Sentinel’s calculations. The department says it arrested 4,100 more people in 2015 than it reported to the FBI. Based on that count, Orlando’s per-arrest force rate was 3.5 percent.
Richmond, Va., is another city that’s similar to Orlando in population, the size of its minority community and the size of its police department. But the two count force very differently, so the best comparison is the number of suspects who are injured when police used force. In Richmond in 2015, the total was 148. In Orlando it was 236.
Most of the injuries in both cities were minor, each departments reported.
“We have a good system in place,” Mina said. “Last year, we arrested over 15,000 people. We conducted over 60,000 traffic stops … and we used force a little over 500 times, so I think we’re doing a good job.”
Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said officers tend to escalate force when they don’t know what else to do. Departments can minimize the force they use through training, the right tools and oversight, he said.
Reforms
In late January, the city finished a review of OPD’s force policies, something it initiated after the Sentinel had begun asking for use of force records.
In its self-evaluation, the city found “revelations,” according to its 20-page summary. The primary one: A small number of officers accounted for a high percentage of excessive force claims.
On Jan. 29, Mina issued a department-wide directive about force: “Excessive force will not be tolerated,” it said.
The city and department implemented another fix: Beat reassignments.
Department managers urged many officers to move to lower-stress assignments, away from downtown weekend shifts and those in entertainment districts, where department data showed officers used force the most.
The department also fixed its “early intervention” program, designed to flag officers who use force five times in three months or 12 times a year. In its earlier investigation, the Sentinel found 11 cases in which officers should have been flagged but were not. The department blamed a software issue and fixed it, it reported.
Another change, according to Mina, was a greater commitment to training officers to de-escalate conflicts.
Adams, the UCF professor, said that whatever the agency did to reduce the number of times officers use force, “I would encourage them … to keep doing it and try to get that number to go lower. That’s in their interest.”
McKenzie, the man injured when he was pulled from the closet, lost his job at Miller’s Ale House because of the arrest. He has since landed a similar one, he said, but the incident has left a lasting impact.
“You don’t know how difficult it is to go through something like that and live your daily life and wonder if it is going to happen to you again,” he said.
rstutzman@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6394; cminshew@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5923, dharris@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5471. Dave Ress of the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., contributed to this report.
