A man bitten by a police dog during an arrest last month plans to sue the San Diego Police Department, his attorney announced Wednesday.
The lawsuit stems from an incident on the night of Oct. 24. The San Diego Police Department said officers were responding to a 911 call about a man who threatened a woman with a gun.
Police say officers repeatedly ordered him to surrender, but he did not. They say officers used three bean bag rounds and a police dog to take him into custody.
Bystander video of the arrest shows the man, Marcus Evans, walking out of a house with his hands raised, wearing no shirt and no shoes. The video shows police firing a bean bag round at him while his hands are raised.
"Mr. Evans was on the ground in the fetal position, hands up, saying, 'Please don't shoot me. Somebody help me. They're shooting me,'" said Dante Pride, his attorney. "They continued to shoot him two more times. And then, not only do they shoot him two more times, but they deploy the canine officers twice."
Pride said Evans’ behavior was "passive resistance at best." The police department’s procedure on the use of force defines passive resistance as "a refusal to comply with verbal commands and does not convey a threat of physical resistance to the officer or another person."
It says police may use canines and extended range impact weapons "to control an actively resisting subject reasonably believed to possess, or have immediate access to, a deadly weapon."
Community organizer Michael Whyte questioned the officers’ decisions.
"The guy didn't even have on socks," he said. "You could clearly see he was unarmed. What more did you want him to do? You got eight officers right there. Nobody could walk up and cuff him up?"
Police arrested Evans on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest. The department said no weapon was found and he was not booked into jail.
Pride said the bean bag rounds and dog injured Evans’ chest, stomach, shin and arm during the arrest. He’s been unable to return to work.
"We will all be in some type of therapy for this,” said Evans’ mother, Glenda Evans. "We will all have to go through a long road of recovery."
The San Diego Police Department declined an interview request. In a statement on Friday, the department said it was investigating the incident, including reviewing the bystander video, body-worn camera footage and witness statements.
"As with many uses of force, videos of this nature are very difficult to view," Police Chief Scott Wahl said in a statement. "We are already in the process of conducting a thorough review of the incident, and I’m committed to exploring how the situation could have been handled differently. The San Diego Police Department welcomes conversations about our use of force procedures and regularly evaluates those practices to determine if improvements are needed."
Police say the Department of Justice and the city’s Commission on Police Practices will review the investigation.
