Sidebar: A History of Violence

By WAVE STAFF

Story Created: Mar 18, 2009 at 7:11 PM PST

Story Updated: Mar 18, 2009 at 7:45 PM PST

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In recent years, Inglewood Police have been at the center of a number of violent — and sometimes, deadly — episodes involving people of color. In many cases, the department’s internal investigations have concluded that the officers in these incidents did not act improperly. Below, four incidents that sparked outrage.

2002: Inglewood officers are secretly videotaped roughing up 15-year-old Donovan Jackson, an incident that culminated with the handcuffed, developmentally disabled teenager being violently slammed onto the hood of a patrol car, struck with a flashlight and punched in the face. Jackson and his stepfather (who had been stopped for expired vehicle registration) settled a lawsuit against the city for an undisclosed amount. Ironically, two officers fired in the wake of the incident sue Inglewood for reverse discrimination and are awarded $2.4 million.
2007: On May 9 — In what an official Inglewood Police press release calls an incident that began when two officers “attempted to stop a male bicyclist for a municipal code violation,” unarmed 20-year-old Richard Ray Tyson was shot a reported four times by officers, dying after what his mother told the city council were multiple gunshot wounds in his back. Said Vershell Hall: “It wasn’t even in the news — and nobody’s doing anything about it. They killed my son and I don’t know why.” In a column published that July, after the city’s then-police chief said he was unable to disclose any details about the matter pending an inquiry, Wave contributing editor Betty Pleasant called the department’s “internal investigation process … ridiculously slow.”
2008: Early Mother’s Day morning, officers opened fire — in a fast-food restaurant parking lot, and apparently through the windshield of their own police cruiser — on a car containing three young, unarmed Black men, killing 19-year-old Michael Byoune and injuring Tony White, also 19. The officers, for reasons that have yet to be fully explained, report that they used their weapons out of fear for their lives.
2008: Six weeks after the Byoune killing, one of the officers in that incident, Brian Ragan, is involved in the slaying of 38-year-old postal worker Kevin Wicks. According to a police account of the incident, Wicks was shot after pulling a gun on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call in the middle of the night; but a lawsuit filed by Wicks’ mother alleges that “officers entered the wrong apartment, without identifying themselves, for no justified reason and … for no lawful justification shot Kevin three times.” Pictured: official evidence markers identify where bullets struck Wicks’ apartment door.

 

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