Men win settlement after clash with police on Glenwood South – NEWS & OBSERVER

If Brennan Horton and Omeze Nwankwo have an especially merry Christmas, they can thank you, citizens of Raleigh.

More precisely, they can thank the heavy-handed over-reaction of some off-duty city cops moonlighting as security guards in the popular Glenwood South nightclub district. After Horton and Nwankwo hired lawyers, got criminal charges dismissed and went to mediation – and presumably, after city lawyers got a whiff of the alarming audio of the arrests – the city decided to cut them a fat check to make the case go away.

. . .

Attorney James C. White said his clients “filed a claim for improper training in the use of these restraints” and a claim alleging that “the city had violated its non-biased policing policy by a pattern of unlawfully targeting African American men who pose no threat and have engaged in no unlawful activity.”

Yes, the city has a written policy on how officers should interact with black and brown men, which it send to me when I asked about the case. The policy is three pages long and it poo-poos stopping someone based solely on race, ethnicity or country of origin. If brothers had had any input into it, the policy would be one sentence long: “Treat us with the same respect that you treat everybody else, dang it.”

The failure to properly train claim was dismissed because, White said, “quite frankly, the standards for bringing one of those claims against the city is quite high.”

The claim regarding the excessive use of force regarding the hand-restraining zipties couldn’t be so easily dismissed.

Heck, the hard-plastic zipties couldn’t even be easily removed. The pair’s mediation hand was strengthened when, White said, none of the officers admitted in internal affairs interviews to even putting the zipties on Nwankwo.