A U.S. District Court Judge here in Washington just made a ruling that police departments around the U.S. should heed. The Seattle Times reported that the judge upheld a $15.1 million jury verdict against the city of Lakewood, the Lakewood Chief of Police, and two Lakewood police officers (and the Police Chief and the two officers are personally liable) for killing an unarmed Black man, Leonard Thomas, during a SWAT operation in 2003. But the judge did more — she blistered the defense for suggesting that the jury members feared racial backlash if they did not hold the City and the police officers responsible for the killing of Mr. Thomas. The judge dismissed a set of post-trial motions for setting aside the verdict, ordering a new trial, or granting the police officers immunity from liability, while stating that the evidence at trial gave the jury ample grounds for concluding that the Police Chief and the other officers acted “outrageously, unreasonably and with malice and callous indifference to the life of Thomas, or the impact their actions would have on his young son and parents.”
Leonard Thomas was a 30-year-old father of a 4-year-old boy undergoing an emotional crisis when his mother called the police after he knocked a cell phone out of her hand. Expecting an officer to respond to calm her son down, instead a full-tilt SWAT response showed up, and a 4 hour standoff ensued at Thomas’ home. It was clear to everyone that Thomas was unarmed, and he and his son were standing on his porch, with an agreement in place to give the boy over to the boy’s mother, when a squad of SWAT officers blew the back door of the house with a concussion device, stormed in, and killed the family dog. Thomas, on the front porch, was startled by this and reached over to hold his son. As he did this, a SWAT sniper shot and killed him. The sniper had been given a direction by the Police Chief to not let Thomas go back inside the house.
After Thomas was shot, the SWAT officers rushed up and “repeatedly punched [Thomas] in the face while he died, despite [his] having never threatened violence to anyone that night.” These are the District Court Judge’s words.