Jury orders Portland to pay man who was shot with a taser

[Liberal_in_LA]

Jury orders Portland to pay man who was shot with a taser

By Steve Beaven, The Oregonian
September 21, 2009, 11:00AM

A man who was shot with beanbags, zapped with a taser and jailed after he videotaped Portland police officers searching for a jaywalker has been awarded $55,000 in a federal suit against the city.

An eight-person jury on Friday ordered the city to pay Frank Waterhouse, Jr., who was acquitted in Multnomah County Circuit Court of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass charges in October 2006.

“The case wasn’t really about the money,” Ben Haile, Waterhouse’s attorney, said this morning. “But money was the only way to hold these officers accountable.”

Waterhouse, 37, was arrested after videotaping officers as they searched a Northeast Portland auto-body yard for a jaywalker who’d run from police.

The police later said Waterhouse was mistaken for the jaywalker and that officers resorted to force because they thought he could use the camera as a weapon. :eyes:

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/09/jury_orders_portland_to_pay_ma.html

More:
According to a report in The Oregonian, Frank Waterhouse claims that on May 27, 2006 he was brutally assaulted by police when officers followed a sniffer dog onto the property in pursuit of a fleeing suspect.

Waterhouse says that the dog keyed on a car, prompting officers to break out a window which upset residents who maintain that no one ran onto the property. It was at that point that an angry resident grabbed a video camera and started to film the police search.

The Oregonian report states:

When one woman was told to stop recording, she gave the videocamera to Waterhouse. He walked to the edge of the property, climbed up a dirt embankment and continued to record. At one point, he yelled to his friend, “Yes, I got it all on film. They had no right to come on this property.”

He says in the suit that police immediately came after him, and yelled at him “put it down.” Officers moved towards him, and he said, “Don’t come after me.” Waterhouse said seconds later he was shot with a bean bag gun and a Taser and fell to the ground.

Here is the video that Waterhouse shot. It ends with a female officer approaching him and firing taser darts into his body:

http://noworldsystem.com/category/frank-waterhouse/

[sasquatch]

1. Not enough and it should come from the cops, not the city

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. I know but apparently it's a fantasy to think the cops ever pay

[PM Martin]

3. Parasites!

[noiretextatique]

4. this is a part of the cost of police abuse

not including the suffering of their victims. the teabaggers should be up in arms about this, but i guess they don't mind their tax dollars being spent to pay for police abuses :shrug:

[indepat]

5. Perhaps when a few more citizens are awarded large sums after having been wrongfully tasered,

or otherwise unlawfully harmed, maybe municipalities across the country will awaken to the enormous liability they face by playing like this nation is already a police state wherein individuals have no constitutional protections and their law enforcement officers can act like brownshirt goons. :P

[Gman2]

6. We surely and truly have lost our fourth amendment.

Many know of my three swat entries in my homw. Never anything. I am clean.