Police altercation near Phoenix church ‘put fear into community’
By Michael Ferraresi/The Arizona Republic
Some parishioners saw the men being handcuffed by police. They wondered why one man was face-down on the street outside their church, blood dripping from his face.
The incident outside St. Paul the Apostle Sudanese Episcopal Church, in which Phoenix police officers were accused of falsely arresting and abusing two Sudanese refugees, led to a recent $150,000 settlement to avoid a lawsuit.
Attendance at prayer services at the church near Seventh Avenue and Buckeye Road averaged more than 130 people prior to the incident, though word of the altercation “put fear into the community” of refugees, many of whom are now avoiding the neighborhood out of fear of racial profiling and police brutality, the church pastor said.
“The news of that incident, it caused the numbers to go down,” the Rev. Anderia Arok said.
Services now average 60 to 70 people, Arok said.
The two Sudanese men who received the settlement were planning on attending a prayer service inside the church that day in July 2009, joining other refugees to discuss an international court’s ruling on a regional dispute in their war-torn homeland.
St. Paul the Apostle, which is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, caters to Sudanese refugees.
An internal police investigation cleared Officers Jason Hammernick and Corey Shibata of any wrongdoing. City officials said similar settlements are approved to avoid the added expense of defending officers in court.
The notice of claim from the incident outlined how the officers “conspired to falsify” details of the case to justify their probable cause for booking the men on suspicion of resisting arrest and to “avoid being held accountable for their wrongful conduct.”
Hammernick and Shibata told supervisors that they targeted the men as part of a routine traffic stop after running a license plate on a rented Nissan Xterra revealing that the vehicle had been used in a drug case months earlier.
Arok said the incident “looked like a humiliation,” and that many parishioners believed that the escalation from the traffic stop resulted from racial profiling. He said the men were wearing ties and looked like church members, not anyone connected with illegal drug activity.
“We are not denying there are drugs in the area, but this was in front of the church,” Arok said.
Aluk Bak Deng, 38, of Tucson, and Angok Atem, 28, claimed they were aggressively pushed and shoved outside the vehicle, though the officers said the men refused to comply with commands, which led to the physical escalation.
Bak Deng and Atem were with a third man sitting in the rental vehicle as they waited for Arok to open the church for the afternoon prayer service. Bak Deng, president of the Arizona chapter of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, was scheduled to speak at the service.
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