The possibility of a consent decree hangs over the Phoenix Police Department as a result of the findings in the nearly three year long investigation by the Department of Justice.
The investigation, which began in 2021, found that the Phoenix Police Department had consistently violated human rights, including the alleged use of “unjustified deadly force”.
The investigation was spurred by years of allegations of discrimination and abuse against the police department. As a result, the federal government may soon be overseeing the management of the Phoenix Police.
In the years leading up to the investigation, there were several instances involving Phoenix police officers that gained national attention and caused controversy in the city.
One of those instances involved Martha “Marti” Winkler. Winkler was severely injured during an interaction with police in 2014, where she claims Phoenix Police officer Jason Gillespie physically attacked her without cause.
Winkler called the police believing a Circle K clerk was trying to scam her into buying a more expensive lottery ticket than she wanted. She claims that when the officer arrived, he slammed her against the ground without cause, fracturing her skill and giving her permanent brain damage.
Speaking with Winkler after a recent Phoenix City Council meeting, she detailed her experience and her continued frustration with both the Phoenix Police Department, as well as the Phoenix City Council over Officer Gillespie not being fired.
“He kept demanding that he pulled the wrong ticket and he kept demanding that I buy it,” she said, regarding what prompted her to call the police.
Winkler said the clerk eventually budged, giving her the ticket that she had originally asked for. She chose to call the police, concerned the clerk had been attempting to scam other customers into buying more expensive tickets than they had asked for.
“[The Police] treated me like I was a serial killer,” she said. “[Officer Jason Gillespie] fractured the back of my skull from the top of my skull to the base of my skull. That’s about 4 inches,” she said.
Wiinkler lost her initial case, but eventually won on appeal.
In court, Gillespie claimed the clerks at the store had also called the police and accused Winkler of trespassing, to which the officer claimed she began screaming. Following this, he restrained her to the ground and called an ambulance.
The Phoenix City Council recently approved a plan to make significant changes to the Phoenix Police Department and how it handles certain situations involving its officers.
The plan includes developing new policies to ensure that there are no uses of excessive force by police officers, combating the racial disparities in treatment by police officers, and having efficient internal investigations into alleged violations by police officers.
Larnell Farmer, who is a former police officer in Illinois and is currently the president of the NAACP’s West Valley branch in Arizona, doesn’t believe these policy changes are enough.
“The city, the department, they deserve the consent decree,” he said.
Farmer criticized the Phoenix City Council and Police Department for wanting to correct the issues in the DOJ’s findings themselves, without the involvement of the federal government.
“You’ve had decades and decades to do that and the complaints have been swept under the rug, from little complaints to major complaints, where people have lost their lives at the hands of the police, ” Farmer said.
If the City of Phoenix chooses to reject the consent decree, the DOJ has signaled they will take the city to federal court in an attempt to impose it.
The Phoenix City Council largely opposes the consent decree, with Phoenix City Councilman Carlos Galindo-Evira having expressed that his constituents oppose the measure.
“What the residents of District 7 have told me is, ‘we do not want the federal government coming in to oversee our police department, but we expect good policing, and our residents deserve to have good policing,’” he said.
The decree looms large over a police department that continues to be subject to heightened scrutiny in wake of the DOJ’s findings.
Edited by Shi Bradley
