We've been face-to-face, yeah."
Last night I attended a Toledo City Council meeting. Council-Chairwoman Vanice Williams, called the special meeting following an incident where a TPD police officer jacked a teenage girl up against a police car, and then took her to the ground, twice. Toledo Police Chief Mike Troendle was present and addressed the city council, and then members of the public were given opportunities to speak.
Chief Troedle began by addressing Toledo’s crime statistics, which are down for violent felonies like homicide and robbery. I wanted to ask what are the jaywalking statistics. Are the jaywalking statistics down in North Toledo now that a teenage girl has been taken down for jaywalking?
No. The jaywalking statistics aren’t down in Toledo, but the TPD’s statistics for prowling Toledo’s neighborhoods and preying on teens, are up.
TPD police officers don’t need more training. Before anyone is hired as a police officer the person must undergo extensive training and be certified. The TPD has a “continuum-of-force” policy, which TPD officers are trained on, that incorporates the law found in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Graham v. O’Conner. That’s enough training right there.
TPD Special Ops Detain Teens
If a school principal, mandatory-reporter, care-taker, guardian, CPS worker, or any other adult employee of an organization raced thru a Toledo neighborhood in a speeding car, past young kids playing basketball in the street, and jumped out of the car, and then threw a teen against a car and to the ground, twice, that person would be fired from their job immediately and charged with felony child-abuse.
The TPD police officer that used unreasonable force in the videos does not need to be reassigned to work in another neighborhood. What neighborhood is he being reassigned to? I don’t want a Toledo police officer like that in West Toledo. We already have enough.
Since the video with the teenage girl was published, another incident involving the same TPD police officer allegedly has surfaced. Yet, Chief Troendle wants to reassign this TPD police officer and give him more training because he’s a rookie and has only been on the job a year. The head of the Toledo Police Officers association also spoke out on behalf of this rabid rookie. But not firing this TPD police officer will only embolden him and other rogue police officers like him.
What happens when the next teenager runs because that teenager doesn’t want to give his name, and doesn’t know why a Toledo police officer just jumped out of an unmarked TPD police vehicle and began chasing him. And if the rogue rookie TPD police officer thought the 15-year-old girl trying to call her mother on her cellphone was a threat, what are the TPD Special Ops officers gonna do when they believe a scared teenager running away from them is a threat?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m not anti-police. I stand against bad policing. The images I’ve shared above are from an incident that occurred in West Toledo. I saw a group of teenagers being chased by Toledo police officers. I don’t know how many, if any, of the teenagers got away, or what the cops were chasing them for. I do know that these were TPD Special Operations officers and detectives. They chased and apprehended the people shown in the images. The TPD Special Ops searched them and ran their names. Why were they chased? Was any record of this incident made?
This post will be updated with additional photos and videos. Yes, a video of the TPD Special Ops in action in West Toledo.
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