Steller column: Big questions arise as judge issues injunctions vs. TPD officers
Arizona Daily StarSep 03, 2018
Both ended up in the same place, though -- granting restraining orders that involved members of the
The flurry of court action over the last two weeks has troubled the department and exposed a couple of distinct issues in the local justice system.
One involves the mental-health unit, a team on the cutting edge of law enforcement that has existed since 2014.
It turns out that when officers are assigned to a unit like that, they respond to calls concerning the same mentally ill people over and over, year after year. And a few of those people don't like it. They may get angry at the individual officers who seemingly pry into their lives, or obsess about the officers.
The other issue is the variability in the way judges may apply the standards for issuing these injunctions -- especially when they involve police officers. Imagine if you were worried about being arrested by certain officers, but you could simply fend them off by getting an order that forces them to stay away from you. Nice, right?
This all started when
By early 2015, the frequent contact the officers were having with one man was already leading to trouble. That man,
It was part of a pattern of behavior that led Jackson, now 47, to be convicted of felony stalking against Dial, along with aggravated harassment against a former roommate. "The persistence of his actions and the lengths to which he went to harass the victims is alarming and suggest he poses a foreseeable risk to the community," the report said.
Jackson pleaded guilty but insane to the charges and was sentenced in
I called and spoke with him Friday morning, and he said he would call back within 30 minutes, but he did not, and he didn't respond to a later call.
At the time of the 2015 crimes, Jackson already had a long history of asking judges for injunctions against harassment against people he said were after him. Between 2010 and 2013, Jackson requested seven injunctions, two of them against employees at a staffing agency, and had five approved by judges,
So it was perhaps predictable, given that history and repeated contacts with the mental-health unit, that Jackson would seek injunctions against harassment against the two officers he'd seen the longest, Dial and Schladweiler.
On
The time frame he gave for the officers' harassment was
Injunctions against harassment are a type of restraining order that allow judges to tell a certain individual to leave the petitioner alone. One of the key differences from orders of protection is that injunctions against harassment are for non-family members. Using the injunction tool against a police officer doing his job, though, was inventive.
I spoke Friday with
He also explained that the standard is relatively low for obtaining these injunctions. The petitioner files a complaint and usually sees a judge within an hour, without the respondent present. Then the petitioner must only show through his or her testimony that it is more likely than not that the respondent harassed the petitioner at least twice in the last year.
"Generally they are just a few minutes long," Simon said of these initial hearings. "If they're going to take more than a few minutes, that suggests there should be a hearing (with both sides present) before you grant an inunction, which is your job as a judge."
On
"I want the order to be that they cannot contact anyone -- not my girlfriend, my kids, anyone in my family or my profession," he said. "I would like it to be no contact with anybody in my life at all."
Bee would not consent to that broad an order, but he did approve the five requested injunctions, even the man whose last name was unknown, warning Jackson in court that the officers and other respondents would probably challenge them.
The injunctions sparked a whirl of activity in the
Deputy Police Chief
In fact, it was the second puzzlingly generous decision by Bee this year on requests for injunctions against harassment. In March, Bee granted an injunction to a
Jackson's requests were not the end of the injunctions. On Wednesday, a cadre of TPD colleagues, including Dial, went to court seeking their own injunctions against harassment against Jackson and another man. It happens that recently a different person seen by the mental-health team showed up at Dial's home.
Justice of the Peace
"Everyone who comes here for an order of protection perceives threats," Aboud told Dial. "But you have to be able to articulate, and you have to have two or more incidents to obtain the order."
Momentarily, Dial gave up in frustration at Aboud's questioning, so much more demanding than Bee had been to Jackson the previous week. Then a fellow officer's testimony helped Dial win the injunction after all.
Simon, the retired judge, told me often judges don't have enough information about a petitioner to question whether he's an abuser of the system or has a legitimate complaint.
"They don't have the information as to whether this same person has filed against five other people, or maybe aganst this same guy in city court," Simon said. "We don't necessarily have the picture of what's going on."
Of course, five requests on the same day was extremely unusual.
The officers and attorneys now have a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, at which both sides will be present. I doubt the injunctions will survive.
But we still need to ask how we got to this point, where officers have been harassed in their homes for doing mental-health work, and judges are handing out injunctions without demanding specific testimony and evidence of harassment.
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Contact: tsteller@tucson.com or 807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter
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