Fairview Heights cop’s use of force was appropriate and ‘restrained,’ investigation says
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Fairview Heights SkyZone incident
Read the BND’s previous coverage of the incident at the Fairview Heights business.
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A police officer shown in viral social media videos using his fists to break up a fight between two girls at the Sky Zone indoor trampoline park acted within his department’s training and use-of-force policy, according to an internal investigation by the Fairview Heights Police Department.
The officer was attempting to break the girls’ grip on each other’s hair, not punching them in the head, the investigation concluded.
The findings were backed by the independent review of the Illinois State Police and O’Fallon-Metro East Chapter of the NAACP.
An elected city official, Alderman Ryan Vickers, had called for the investigation after seeing the videos of the incident on Facebook and Instagram and asked that the officer by suspended. He called the use of force “inappropriate” given the girls’ age and race, an assessment he stood by Friday after the investigation’s outcome was released.
Tim Mueller, the police department’s public information officer, said last week that all incidents involving the use of force are investigated.
The investigation of the Sky Zone incident found the officer’s response to the “volatile and dangerous” situation exhibited a “tremendous amount of restraint.”
“While some initially shared images made it appear the officer was improperly striking one of the participants; the branch observed the officer merely striking the hands/forearms of one participant to beak the grip of another individual’s hair,” the statement said.
About 10:30 p.m. Saturday, June 26, officers from Fairview Heights and other police departments were sent to Sky Zone, 10850 Lincoln Trail, to disperse a crowd of more than 200 patrons.
While officers were there, several fights broke out in the business’s vestibule and parking lot.
Officers took four juveniles into custody for disorderly conduct and resisting police. All were released to their parent’s custody.
Fairview Heights Police said that, during the melee, some members of the crowd were encouraging others to harm the officers. They could not be identified.
Meanwhile, videos of the fighting spread widely throughout social media, including those that showed the unnamed officer’s intervention.
They showed two females engaged in a fight, each bent over at the waist while pulling at the other by the hair. The officer appeared to be using a clenched fist to punch downward toward the juveniles.
Facebook comments reflected outrage, with some comparing the Fairview Heights officer to Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer who in April was convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd, who was Black. The Fairview Heights police officer in the video is white and the juvenile girls are both Black.
Three days after the incident, Mayor Mark Kupsky and Police Chief Chris Locke requested an independent review of the videos by Illinois State Police and the O’Fallon-Metro East Chapter of the NAACP.
According to a statement from the Fairview Heights Police Department, neither found issue with the officer’s actions or with the manner in which the internal investigation was handled.
“These officers were surrounded by a large crowd. Individuals from this crowd were rushing into the altercations and attempting to do harm to the combatants and/or the officers. One officer was dragged to the ground and another had equipment stolen,” according to the statement.
Francine Nicholson, president of the O’Fallon-Metro East Chapter of the NAACP, said in an interview with the BND that she watched the videos of the incident and agrees with the investigation’s conclusions.
“Both myself and my first vice president went to the police department and observed multiple videos taken from different angles,” she said. “My perspective was that the police were trying to break up a fight between two young ladies. One young lady had braids in her hair and the other girl was pulling at the braids. She could have done some serious damage. The officer struck her hand to break her hold on the braids in a way that a mother might say ‘Don’t do that.’
“The officers showed a lot of restraint because there was so much chaos going on around them.”
Nicholson said she meets regularly with Locke and O’Fallon Chief Eric Van Hook to discuss issues in the community.
“We have a tremendous relationship,” she said. “And it’s that relationship that allows him to be able to call me up and say ‘Hey, come take a look at this.’”
Alderman doesn’t agree with findings
Ryan Vickers, the elected Fairview Heights official who was critical of the officer’s actions, said on Friday he did not agree with the findings of the investigation.
Vickers, who was heavily criticized for his comments to the Belleville News-Democrat, said he still believes the situation could have been handled better.
Vickers repeated an earlier plea that the complaints made by those who saw the video should be taken seriously, especially in the wake of the George Floyd’s death and subsequent sentencing of the Minneapolis police officer who was responsible for it.
He also had said the use of force was endemic of a police department whose officers do not reflect the diversity in the city’s population, a claim that Locke has taken issue with.
On Tuesday, July 6, several members of the Fairview Heights Police Department spoke during the public comments portion of a city council meeting, calling Vickers’ comments slander and criticizing the BND’s coverage of the incident. Two council members, Denise Williams and Brenda Wagner, called for Vickers to be censured by the board.
“Fairview Heights Officers enjoy strong support from our community,” Locke said on Facebook on Saturday, July 3. “We appreciate the relationship we have and do not take it for granted. We have maintained this relationship by being a professional organization with very high standards. We investigate every use of force and do so thoroughly. This is crucial to keeping the community’s trust in place.”
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREHow we did this story
The Belleville News-Democrat received multiple links to videos of the Sky Zone incident on June 27, the day after it occurred.
We have been unable to post the videos at bnd.com, however, because we have not received permission from the people who took them, and posts to social media do not constitute “fair use.”
In similar instances, the BND embeds links to videos for readers to reference. In this case, however, images clearly showed the faces of the juveniles involved. As a matter of policy, neither Illinois police departments nor the BND will identify juvenile offenders.
We are sharing the reasons for our decision not to post the full video in response to criticism that the single image ``frame grab” with the article doesn’t provide the full context of what happened.
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 5:47 PM.
