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Ten years ago this month, when Brittney Mills was 19, she stopped by her boyfriend’s house in West Philadelphia. Minutes later, officers from the Philadelphia Police Narcotics Unit raided the area – and Mills’ life was turned upside down.
The team included Jeffrey Walker, who later admitted that he and other NFU officers routinely filed evidence, stole suspects and committed perjury. They said they found drugs in the freezer. The only person arrested was Mills, who had no criminal record but had previously had an altercation with Walker. He said to her, “This will teach you to never get smart with officers again.” “
Accused of drug trafficking, Mills spent five days in jail and a year and a half on probation. The consequences didn’t end there: she lost her job. She became homeless after her father kicked her out, believing she was a drug dealer. Worse, she lost custody of her 3-year-old daughter, who was then in the care of Mills’ mother.
“Eleven years later, I’m still trying to get out of it and come back to reality. Every day I have to relive it’s a nightmare, ”said Mills.
In 2014, Mills filed a lawsuit in federal court. But her case was directed to a single file along with hundreds of others. None have been tried, although 212 NFU cases have been resolved, totaling $ 7.2 million. Others, including Mills’ case, have been suspended indefinitely since February 2017, almost four years without progress.
“People’s rights have been violated by the police, and now they are being violated again by the court,” said Mills’ lawyer Margaret Boyce Furey, who has stayed 10 cases under the court order. She first requested the abolition of the stay in 2017, and renewed the request last summer. Both motions were defeated. “There is no incentive for the city to accept settlement offers, as everything is on hold. They know they will not be judged.
“LEARN MORE: Fired, then rehired: How so many dubious Philadelphia cops get their jobs back
US District Judge Paul S. Diamond did not respond directly to a reporter’s questions about the prospects for these cases, but issued an order on Jan. 8 that included a section titled: “Path Going Forward.”
In it, he said the cases had been suspended “at the request of lead counsel for the plaintiffs and the defense” pending settlement negotiations and the resolution of a handful of “indicator” cases, which were said to be suspicious. indicators of how much, if any, the city should pay for the remaining cases. (The stay was ordered on February 8, 2017, the same day one of the attorneys then serving as plaintiffs’ liaison counsel, Larry Krasner, announced his campaign for the Philadelphia district attorney.)
Diamond said the plan still includes trials for the remaining indicator cases, even though there are fewer and fewer cases to track “indicators.” He said the main factor causing delays now is the pandemic, which has suspended jury trials until spring.
Last year, a flagship case was settled for $ 230,000, resolving a complaint from James McIntyre, who claimed the team stole about $ 9,000 from him and planted drugs in his truck. He spent four months in prison.
In that case, Diamond had denied the summary judgment in a damning 33-page memorandum describing corruption and cover-ups within the police department and its internal affairs office. “The IAB performed poorly, in part because of the perception that it was operating in a corrupt fashion: investigators did not respect confidentiality and preferred agents… were protected by supervisors,” Diamond wrote. He also noted that federal prosecutors had started declining cases eight years before the Philadelphia district attorney finally recognized a problem.
The city, for its part, said it was negotiating in good faith, regardless of the legal process, as indicated by the large number of cases already settled. Making the offers, a spokesperson said that “the city considers the facts and evidence in each case, and also considers assessments of previously settled and factually analogous issues.”
Some lawyers see it differently. They believe the city is now waiting for desperate plaintiffs to drop out and accept “nuisance” regulations. I said that of his 36 clients, three accepted relatively small settlement offers and two died.
“The problem is, we have people who because of that have nothing,” Shingles said. “The city knew this and exploited the desperation of these people to try to get rid of them (…) and was not prompted or encouraged by the court to be reasonable.”
Michael Pileggi, the attorney who now serves as liaison counsel, said he hoped Diamond’s order last week would revive the stalled negotiation process. “For me, the best way for everyone is to solve them,” he said. One of his clients, Kareem Torain, who spent 13 years in prison before his case was quashed, has been fighting for seven years for redress.
Meanwhile, other civil cases are still pending and immediately put on hold despite complainants’ objections.
One concerned Kevin Gordon, accused of drug trafficking by the NFU team. After they couldn’t find drugs on him, they continued a warrantless search of his home, drove him around the neighborhood in a police car for hours, and arrested his brother, demanding that he supplies them with cocaine, according to his complaint. Weeks later, called a “snitch” because of his interactions with the team, Gordon was shot in the arm and leg. The police then went to his hospital room in search of the cocaine promised by his brother, he says, before finally arresting him again. He ended up serving six months in prison.
The town offered Gordon $ 2,000 – the “last and best deal,” town lawyers warned last year.
“LEARN MORE: Philly narcotics cops forged papers to hide informants. Hundreds of cases can be disputed.
Philadelphia officials first admitted the team’s misconduct in 2012, when then-prosecutor Seth Williams told police he would no longer call narcotics officers as witnesses. The following year, a group of narcotics officers – Thomas Liciardello, Brian Reynolds, Michael Spicer, Perry Betts, Linwood Norman and John Speiser – were fired and charged. But only Walker, who pleaded guilty and cooperated with federal investigators, was convicted; the six others were acquitted and reinstated in the police.
Yet Philadelphia judges have continued to quash cases involving the officers: so far, 1,138 cases have been quashed, according to Bradley Bridge, an attorney for the Defender Association of Philadelphia. He said 16 cases are still under review.
In total, the city has paid more than $ 65 million in civil rights settlements against the police since 2017. Most recently, it settled with Chester Hollman, who was cleared of murder in 2019 after 28 years in prison, for $ 9.8 million. That works out to $ 350,000 a year in prison.
Mills, who is now a certified nursing assistant and has reunited with her family, said the damage was greater than the prison sentence.
After her arrest, she had so many questions that she enrolled in a college criminal justice program. She hasn’t finished it, but she’s still paying off student loans.
“It haunts me and I feel like justice is not being served,” Mills said. “You don’t say sorry. Offering me a few dollars is not the answer. You brush me under the rug like I don’t matter, like my life doesn’t matter.
