Pulled over and scarred for life
By Rick Holmes
Sept. 25, 2020
Nobody likes getting pulled over for speeding. Even the innocent can’t help but feel guilty when the blue lights are flashing and defensive when the officer approaches. But for Black people, a minor car stop can be deadly. Just ask Sandra Bland or Philando Castile.
Or ask Mark Tinsley. He was going over 40 in a 25 mph zone when Framingham police pulled him over in 2012. Instead of asking Tinsley to hand over his license and registration, the officer asked him to get out of the car. When Tinsley asked why, the cop just made his request louder. When Tinsley refused, things got ugly fast.
Two more officers joined the original two, demanding Tinsley exit his vehicle. Soon a fifth arrived on the scene. Officers then “reached into the vehicle, grabbed Tinsley, and tried to pull him out. Tinsley actively resisted and ‘scream[ed]’ for help, trying to get "someone [to] pay attention to what [was] going on," according to a summary of events recounted in an opinion handed down last week by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
But no bystanders were there with cell phones recording the scene, so the officers continued with their work. They grabbed Tinsley and pulled. When he became tangled in his seat belt, they cut it.
“After Tinsley was dragged from his vehicle, he fell to the ground, and several police officers began beating him,” the SJC writes. “Once on the ground, Tinsley did not resist. He tried to put his hands behind his back so that the police officers would handcuff him and thus, he thought, stop hitting him. The police officers did not stop. Reardon struck Tinsley's collarbone and upper shoulder, and stomped on Tinsley's left hand. Lurie sprayed Tinsley with pepper spray. Green called Tinsley a "f*cking n*gger" and kicked Tinsley in the head. While Tinsley was on the ground, an officer handcuffed him. Tinsley suffered a broken nose, a broken finger, and a wound on the side of his head that required stitches.”
Here’s how Tinsley described it at his trial: "I know I was slammed on my head. Um, I hit the ground and … on the way down to the ground, all I could feel was blows to my body – my whole body. My head – everywhere – coming everywhere. . . . They [were] hitting me, ... they [were] kicking me, they [were] punching me, they [were] hitting me with whatever they had. ... I know it was fist blows…,feet blows … at one point, I was on the ground ... an officer came running – I could see his boot coming to kick me in my face. That's when I turned my head and he kicked me right in the back of my head.” Tinsley testified that, once a police officer handcuffed him, the police officers continued to hit him, and that one police officer had his boot on the side of Tinsley's face and ground his head into the ground.
Framingham, this is your police officers at work.
After they were done beating Tinsley, the officers arrested him. He was eventually tried and convicted of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault and battery, and carrying a dangerous weapon (a knife). We’d probably know nothing about it – on the police blotter it looked all too routine – except that Tinsley filed a civil suit charging the five officers with violating his civil rights, a suit that finally made its way to the SJC eight years after the beating.
The state’s highest court ruled Tinsley could sue over actions taken by police after he was pulled out of his car. That decision was handed down with decisions on two similar cases in which it set new standards for racial profiling in law enforcement. Among other things, the court declared that suspicious behavior by a Black person when approached by police isn’t a sign of guilt, and may well be an expression of justified fear of police mistreatment.
Who were the officers who beat Mark Tinsley? Let’s say their names: Robert Lewis, Jason Lurie, Joseph Godino, James Green, Greg Reardon and Dinis Avila.
And let’s note this: All of them appear to still be on the Framingham Police payroll. City records show Green earned more than $190,000 last year, Reardon more than $170,000.
The attack on Tinsley happened 17 months after officer Paul Duncan shot Eurie Stamps Sr. in the head as he lay on the floor of his Framingham home. Duncan’s defenders have called his killing of an innocent man a tragic accident. It can also be seen as part of a pattern of police brutality. To state an uncomfortable truth: If Mr. Stamps had been white, he would have been safe that night. If Mr. Tinsley had been white, they probably would never have pulled him out of the car.
Like the officers who beat up Tinsley, Duncan is still a Framingham cop. The fact that Duncan was never prosecuted or publicly disciplined may be connected to the assault on Tinsley: If you don’t punish police brutality, you get more police brutality. The fact that all these men still wear the badge undermines Mayor Yvonne Spicer’s claims to have cleaned up the police department.
But there is a larger point to be made in telling Mark Tinsley’s story. In this season of reckoning with racism and police violence, we rightly say the names of those whose lives were ended at the hands of police: Eurie Stamps Sr., George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and so many more. But for every person killed by police, there are hundreds who, like Tinsley, are punched, kicked and hospitalized by cops – then sent to jail, adding injustice to injury. For every one of those, there are thousands who are humiliated and intimidated in routine encounters with police.
I’ve been pulled over plenty of times in my half-century of driving. In every case, once the officer saw how old and white I was, I was treated with courtesy and respect. But a Black man I met at a march for Eurie Stamps told a different story. He was pulled over at night, coming home from an event, with his 9-year-old son asleep in the back seat. It was a small infraction, but the cops acted like he was a dangerous felon, approaching both front doors with their guns drawn, pointed at his face.
“I kept thinking, ‘what if my son wakes up in the back, and says the wrong thing?’” he said. “Those guys might have killed me.”
The incident happened years ago, but I could tell it left a scar. Having a gun pointed at you, experiencing fear for your life, leaves no blood. It’s not logged in the police report. But the trauma is real and lasting. Talk to enough people of color and you learn that their interactions with police, often if not always, are very different from the experiences of us white folks.
Framingham’s politicians, like civic leaders everywhere, need to hear the stories of people of color hurt by their interactions with police. And once they know about the racial disparities in law enforcement, they need to do something about it.