A Black man, who is deaf and has cerebral palsy is facing felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest charges after he was repeatedly punched and tasered by a pair of Phoenix police officers. Join us as we discuss one of the most violent and racist police departments in the country.
Podcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am your host, Ramses job is Ramsy's job.
I am q Ward. You are listening to Civic Cipher as you.
Are, and this is a special episode. This is something that has been a long time coming. We've wanted to include stories that we can't get to on the radio for a long time, and the past few weeks have been crazy for us. We've been all over the country, you know, doing our best to do good work, and you know, we haven't really been able to be in the studio as much as we like. But also because of the election season, we have had a lot of our airtime dedicated to interviews and and other things, and so there are stories that historically we haven't been able to get to and we just kind of chalked it up. But now that we have this relationship with I Hearten and the capacity to podcast as often as we like, we are committing to leaving less on the cutting room floor. So today we are going to talk about a story that we've been wanting to get to for some time, and we know we won't be able to get to. On our next episode, we're going to talk about a gentleman named Tyron MacAlpin. You may have seen his apprehension and arrest on social media. The video has been circulating. It is a violent and immediate arrest for those of you who have a modicum of empathy for your fellow human beings who likely will have been appalled and disgusted by the video. But for those who have not seen it, we are definitely going to tell you about it. Our hope is that this gives you some insight into some of the things that we are trying to say on this show that might feel maybe unbelievable. I know that if you listen to this show, you have a propensity toward trying to learn, trying to believe things. But I know that some things might still be beyond your grasp or your reality. Our show deals a lot with data. Our show deals a lot with journalistically, in journalistic integrity and not simply our own opinions. However, data doesn't always tell the story. I think that today's story will indeed tell the story that the data is trying to tell. I'm going to share a bit from ABC fifteen. The writer of this article is Dave Biskobing. This comes again from Phoenix, Arizona. A black man who is deaf and has cerebral palsy is facing felony, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest charges after he was repeatedly punched and tasered by a pair of Phoenix police officers. The violent and rapid arrest of Tyrone MacAlpin raises serious questions and could serve as a test case for Phoenix and the Department of Justice, as the two battle over whether the Phoenix Police Department it's federal oversight. The violent arrests thems from a morning call from Circle K employees who reported that a white man was causing problems and wouldn't leave the store. Record show while being trespassed, the white man claimed he was assaulted by a black man and pointed across the street at McAlpin. Officers Harris and Sue took the man's claims at face value and left him to go after McAlpin. The man's assault claim was later refuted by store employees and surveillance video record show. I'm going to pause right here just to bring up to speed in cases a little hard to follow. A white man was being trespassed from a circle K. It was causing problems in a circle K. The employees wanted him gone. Police showed up. They approached the white man. The white man says, hey, I was having a problem with that black man over there, and the police say, oh, really, and then they leave him and then go to the black man. All right, let's continue. After handcuffing MacAlpin, his girlfriend arrived at the arrest and told the officers that he was deaf and had cerebral palsy. According to body camera footage, none of the officers at the scene included any information about MacAlpin's disabilities in their reports. Body camera video shows officers unexpectedly go after Macalpen, punch him in the head at least ten times, taser him four times, and wrap their arms around his neck. Phoenix police officials did not answer specific questions about the arrest, but confirmed it is under internal investigation, but Phoenix Police and Maricopa County prosecutors continued to pursue a criminal case against Macalpen. During a recent preliminary hearing, Maricopa County Superior Court Commissioner Nixconey found there was probable cause for his August nineteen, twenty twenty four arrest. Macalpen was arrested by officers Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue, and their police reports and court testimony, the two officers stated Macwpen was going to run, took a fighting stance through repeated punches, and wouldn't comply with commands. MacAlpin's attorney said body camera video and surveillance footage showed the officer's claims are false and said there's an obvious explanation for why he couldn't comply. Quote. The answer is easy. He's deaf, he couldn't understand what they were doing, and he had done nothing wrong, Shoe Walter said. Goes on to say, everything I see in that video is tyrone just trying to avoid being harmed by these officers, and that only makes them increase the escalation and the violence they're using. The arrest happened two months after the Department of Justice released a Historic and Severe report outlining a long list of systemic failures within Phoenix Police and q's going to have a little bit more on that a little bit later. For those that do listen to the show. You may recall us doing an episode where we were discussing some insights into police departments around the country, Phoenix being one of them. Uh, you know where we don't have to provide opinions or build bridges mental bridges for you, our listener. We don't, and this is one such instance where we did that. It was a report from the Department of Justice. We took the article from the Associated Press, and we gave insight into the Phoenix Police's discriminatory policing practices, and then this story happens. So before we get there, Q, I want you to kind of talk us through what you saw when you first saw the video, because you know it reads differently than it feels. And I remember when we first saw the video and we had a conversation about it, just kind of when you talk me through it, I was like, oh my god.
I think it's important to always point out that a crime being committed should not render you being assaulted by law enforcement. And we know that's how they feel as well, because we have seen multiple now white male mass shooters not only safely apprehended with no violence at all, but treated with dignity and respect and even care by law enforcement officers after their arrest. Are you okay? Are you thirsty? Are you hungry? Let's get you something to eat. So what I saw in the video, with no context, not having read anything, was a black man walking down the street or through a parking lot it's hard to tell from the angle of the camera, a police vehicle swerving in front of him, him noticing, okay, a vehicle is in front of me now, and trying to walk to avoid walking into this vehicle that seemed to very intentionally cut him off, and an officer exiting the vehicle to beat him up. The vehicle's door opened, the officer jumps out of the vehicle and attacks the man. There is no in between the door opens, he attacks him, and a man who looks like someone being attacked, trying to prevent himself from being struck, trying to break his fall, and then trying to stop his face from being smashed into the pavement. Another officer arrives and joins in on the fight. So you get to watch two officers beat a man up, chase him, and beat him up some more. That's what the video shows.
Now, when we talk about videos like this, we don't talk about them so that you can know every single individual instance of police violence in the country. What we do is we try to give you insight into what police violence looks like and the and the implifica, the implications and ramifications sorry of police violence and how it shapes outcomes for black people in this country. But as often as we can, we point this back to the data, to the prevalence of how this disproportionately happens to black and brown people and less so to white people. We continue to make our case that we are dealing with a different set of circumstances that affect us differently. I'm not talking about ramses, I'm not talking about que I'm talking about our people. And this interaction gives full insight into what it must be like to be a black person living in most every city with a police department. This gives insight into why we have a deep seated distrust borderline fear of police. This gives insight into why the strained relationship between black communities and police departments is hard to repair. And the truth is this just gives insight into our reality. Now again, I'm not speaking as an individual in this moment. I could I can tell you my own stories of my own police interactions. I've done it on this show many times. But imagine you're walking as Q mentioned a police it was a police truck for those that want to check out the video, pulls in front of you into almost into a parking spot. The ready assumption for me, Ramses would be, well, he's pulling up here, he's obviously got to run into the circle. Ka. That has nothing to do with me or into whatever story. That original location was a circle, was not a circle car. So he's but he's a parking lot, it looks like. So he pulls in and nearly into a parking spot, so clearly he's going in there to figure something out, and he's in a rush. Let me not get in his way. As soon as the door opens, you couldn't count it two. As soon as the door opens, that officer was barreling toward him. And what do you do when someone is running towards you. You instinctively put your hands up. Okay, this is an instinct. This isn't resisting arrest, this isn't complying, This isn't you know he was trying to fight me. This isn't anything like that, anything with a nervous system will either fight or flight or prepare to be overwhelmed. I mean, if a car is barreling towards you, if someone is on a bike and they're riding towards you, you're going to put your hands up to kind of brace yourself. And this is almost what Tyron was able to do. But we'll find out later that the police are actually using that against him to justify their assault of him. And that's what gives the judge what the judge needs to say, Well, there's enough here to prosecute Tyron. So the officer, as Q mentioned, jumps out. Two seconds later, it's a full on beat down. The officers are kneeling on him. Comply, stop resisting, put your hands behind your back, and he can't. You know, that nervous system will cause you to maybe cover your face or whatever. This isn't what happening in the video, but you understand what I'm trying to say. But also he can't hear. And the officers didn't take a moment to extend a modicum of grace to this human being as he was walking down the street. He took they took the word of a white guy that was lying ran up and beat him up in a parking lot. And now the judge says that the guy that got beat up in the parking lot, they didn't do anything wrong. There's there's enough evidence for the case to proceed that he assaulted the officers and that he was guilty of resisting arrest. Again he can't hear.
And again was being arrested for something that did not happen.
Yeah, so I think that we should take a moment and talk numbers, talk findings, talk fact, talk journalism so that this doesn't just feel like Qwan Rams' opinion on this. So what we're going to do is share a little bit from of our notes from an older episode, and we employee to go check that out. I believe it was maybe early August when we did this one, but we do have our notes from that and this is indeed about the same police department we're discussing today, the Phoenix Police Department and the Department of Justice's findings. Go ahead.
Q There's been noted that the Phoenix Police Department has been under investigation by the United States Justice Department, essentially under the suspicion of civil rights violations. This is no longer a suspicion. This has been confirmed. This from the Associated Press. Phoenix police discriminate against black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people, and use excessive force, including justified deadly force, according to a sweeping federal civil rights investigation of law enforcement in the nation's fifth largest city. These are findings facts statements from the United States Justice Department. Report release says that investigators found stark racial disparities in how officers in Phoenix enforce certain laws, including low level drug and traffic offenses. Investigators found that Phoenix officers shoot at people who do not pose an inherent threat, fire their weapons after threats have been eliminated, and routinely delay medical care for people injured in encounters with officers. I think some people that listen to our show, I think some people in general, and I don't. I'm saying I think this like it's an opinion. No. I've heard people say that black peace people have a victim mentality, that we race bait, that we create this victim narrative where we're somehow always under the boot. This is not something that we have created. Again, these are statistics. And information from the United States Justice Department, not the NAACP, not RAMSI's JA, not any legacy civil rights organization that's sole purposes to highlight wrongdoings done to black people. These are findings that we now know are fact. I gave you some statements. Let me give you some numbers. Black people in the city of Phoenix are three and a half times more likely than white people, for example, to be cited or arrested for not signaling before turning Hispanic drivers more than fifty percent more likely than white drivers to be cited or arrested for speeding near school zones. Native American people are forty four times and to drive that home even further a still equivalent to four hundred percent more likely than white people on a per capital basis to be cited or arrested for possessing and consuming alcohol. Officers investigating drug related offenses stated to twenty seven percent more likely to release a white person within thirty minutes or less. Native Americans accused of the same offenses were detained longer. Native Americans were fourteen percent more likely to be booked for trespass, while officers release white people accused of the same offense. I truly wish that people would adopt a position of ignorance or naivete instead of wrongfully assuming, even asserting what they perceived to be instances of non compliance. He would have just listened to the officers. Everything would have been okay. These are not our opinions, This is not how we feel. This is what is actually happening. And police are so emboldened and get to operate with such impunity that, while being investigated by the United States and found guilty of civil rights violations without hesitation, these officers, at the pointed finger of a guilty white man, pursued, assaulted, beat up, arrested a deaf black man with cerebral palsy who had done nothing except be in close proximity to a white man who felt like accusing a black man of something and new that he could weaponize the police against that man, freeing himself of any wrongdoing that he actually did do. Well, Sir, this is America, and this is the city of Phoenix, Arizona, where we currently reside. There's a reason why our hearts beat faster when encountering police in regular, everyday traffic. Is not because we are inherently dangerous or inherently criminal. Our genes and chromosomes, as our former president has said recently, do not make us more inept, more prone to, or more by the nature of our ethnicity criminal. But they have found a way to take black and brown skin and make that the crime you've committed. So all it takes is not even an afraid white person, a white person who's in trouble for having done something to point to you black man, who have done nothing at all, get you assaulted, taste and arrested. And then the video showing all of this goes before a judge in court, and that judge says, yes, that was a rightful arrest and there is probable cause to pursue an investigation into a criminal charge. Now for the black victim of this crime, now, let's talk about that because the police.
Report, they lied on the police report, of course they did. They said that he adopted a fighting stance and all that stuff. And you know, please watch the video. You'll see that there is no fighting stance. But the police, we're on the stand making a case that he did. The best that he did was you could see his body sort of clench as though he was going to be tackled because the officer was already running at him, parked, the truck started running at him, didn't walk, didn't hey, man, can I talk to you for none of that? Running out of the door, the door flung open. The officer said that he bit them, and they tried to show a mark on the officer's arm, and the mark was more consistent with as the officer was trying to put him in the chokehold, he scraped his arm on Tyrone's teeth.
Or maybe the ground, whether they were him on pavement.
This man, this, this was not a fight. There was no fight. Watch the video. It's not a fight at all. And so and the officers are lying very very clearly, but.
They get to lie straight faced while the video of them assaulting him is playing in court in front of everyone, and the judge says, yep.
So when we black folks say, hey, this criminal justice system is stacked against us. When we say hey, you know, we can be innocent of anything, and the criminal justice system in this country can ruin our life, and other people say, well, I mean, just comply, just keep your nose clean, and we don't literally don't have to do anything and die it's dangerous, and even if it doesn't affect us individually, it affects our community, affects our fathers, our brothers, it affects our fiscal prospects. It affects so much. There's a ripple effect to this. And this is not the only battle we're fighting. But the toughest part is being black and living your truth in the middle of a country that blindly enthusiastically supports the police, even when they know that they're lying. They give the police the best possible optics all the time. The reason that there is a modicum of plausible deniability is because they know that the people will accept it. The people will take that, but society at large, so watch this. Our feeling often enough is that police consequences is an oxymoron. There's a lot about police that is an oxymoron. Why is it that we call the police brave when they're always scared of nothing? Watch the testimony. The officer says, well, he put his hands up, and I assumed that that was a fighting stance, and I feared that he was going to strike me, so I pummeled him into the ground.
Yeah, I also often run toward things. I'm afraid of you. See what I'm saying, I can express my bravery.
So how is it that again, oxymon? How are you brave and scared at the same time? Like, I don't get it. But you know the only reason that they can keep that brave thing going perpetually is because we have this obsession with violence, and the police feed that obsession using black and bodies often enough. But let's talk about police consequences because that's the oxymoron I wanted to talk to. I'm gonna get back to this article. Both Harris and Sue were called to testify during a preliminary hearing on October first, twenty twenty four. Harris testified that he immediately went heads on with macalpen within a second. Thought it was two seconds. There's only one second because he believed he was going to run and was going to fight.
Was he going to run or was he going to fight? You believed he was going to do both.
I read it. I read it the same as you. That's what it says, Quote, he raised his hands in a manner that he was going to strike me. Unquote, Harris said during cross examination. Quote what that communicated to me is that I was about to get assaulted and that someone was giving up, not sorry, not that someone was giving up unquote. Harris also testified he didn't know if it was possible that Macalpen raised his hands to protect himself from Harris's sudden punches. In response to a question from the prosecution, Harris said everything could have been avoided if Macalpen had just indicated he was deaf. Let me go back up. How many seconds was that? Cue?
One second?
Okay, let me go back down here, So the officer says, everything could have been avoided if Macalpen just indicated he was deaf within one second. Okay, there we go, all right. Quote, I would have had him sit down, made motions with my hand to have him sit down, and then I would have gotten a pin. Harris testified. As for Officer Sue, he also testified that he saw Macalpen throw punches and claimed that he was bitten on the wrist during the arrest. Officer Sue's body cam fell off at the beginning of the arrest and only shows the ground convenient when asked to pinpoint the moment on Officer Harris's body camera footage when the bite occurred, Sue stopped when the camera was pointed upward and Macalpen was not in frame. How convenient we call this lying, and this is the plausible deniability. Defense attorneys asked Sue if it was possible he scraped his wrist on the ground or MacAlpin's open mouth as they punched, choked, and tasered him, but Sue said no and denied using a choke called on MacAlpin. In a bizarre moment, to refute the defense's claim about this the cause of the scrape on Sue's wrist, the prosecution asked him to stick his hand in his mouth and rub it on his teeth. When Commissioner Secone ruled he had found probable cause for the felony charges to move forward, he did not give an explanation. So we can talk around this all we want, but what we really want you to do, if you haven't done so yet, is watch this video. Whatever it is you need to do to put yourself in that position, but not just what you're seeing in the video. Imagine the fallout of that, and again imagine how it can shape outcomes. Tyron. And now in this thought experiment, you just walking minding your own business. Someone else blames you, weaponizes the police against you, and you're already a target, and you've lived your life like this. This sort of thing can happen at any point in time and can just affect the trajectory of your life, so you live in a perpetual state of I don't want to call it fear, but concern, especially when it comes to the police. Actively avoid the police. But the police pull up. From your perspective, they're clearly not there for you because you've done nothing wrong, and you keep walking. You don't hear their commands because you're deaf, but it doesn't really matter all that much because you're still walking away, and within one second, as we've established, they jump out of the car, rush towards you, and start attacking you. Watch the video, of course, read what the officers wrote, look at their testimony, but watch the video for yourself. You can see that they're lining how they're exploiting the only gaps that they can find to make their version of the story slightly plausible. They're using every single thing that they can possibly use against this man against him, and he's done nothing wrong, and the judge is on the side of the police. Imagine living in that world, Imagine having to pay fines. Imagine if he gets convicted. And of course that may not happen here because of the high profile that this story has. But these are things that happen every day, and I don't need to convince you of that, because again this is a data driven show. Imagine what it's like to miss work because something happened to you and you didn't do anything wrong, and now you've missed out on employment. So now you're looking for a job again, maybe even with a record. Now, imagine getting into the the carceral system and you need to come up with bail money to get out, to fight your case from a position of power, from a position of strength, And if you don't have that money, your chances are diminished. And if you do have that money, it goes somewhere where you never anticipated. You are just living your life. And if you have a family and your income is compromised and your presence is compromised, what happens to your family? And then if your family in turn is compromised, what happens to your community? And if your community is compromised, and society at large looks at you and points the finger and says, what's wrong with those people without looking at themselves, without looking at the system that benefits and protects them and actively harms the rest of us. Then I think you'll start to understand a lot of what we talk talk about on this show. Sit with it, watch the video. I think you're going to come to the same conclusions that we come to. And if not, again, Google is free. The data is all there. You don't have to take Rams's word for it, norques. You can check out the FBI, the Department of Justice, you know, any government agency that you deem appropriate and look at the data. And now that you have another story to explain the data, the real world implications of the data, how it really affects real human beings, and I think you're a little bit further along on the journey, so we'll leave this one right here. Thank you as always for checking us out. Once again, I am your host, Ramsey's job. Big shout out to qboard and do us a find us on all social media at Civic Cipher. Of course, you can hit the website civiccipher dot com and download all of our previous episodes if you're new to the show, and you can also interact with us, let us know if you have any questions, any topics you want us to cover. Be sure to follow us on YouTube if you're not doing that already, And until next time, y'all peace,