PHOENIX — A military veteran tells ABC15 Phoenix police officers racially profiled him when they forced him from his home at gunpoint while looking for a suspect in a domestic violence incident.
Derrick Lewis, 62, has filed a notice of claim, the precursor to a lawsuit, over the incident from December 2022, which he says caused him PTSD.
“I’m a law-abiding, taxpaying citizen,” Lewis told ABC15.
Lewis said he and his girlfriend were home that day. After hearing banging at the door, Lewis said police had rifles pointed at him as they forced him to exit and handcuffed him.
“I was surrounded by police, barking dogs, and the helicopter,” Lewis said. “They told me I looked like a man that crashed his vehicle nearby.”
Lewis’s legal claim against the city said he was detained for 45 minutes. He said officers were looking for a different black man who was 20 years younger than him and five inches taller. The man police were searching for also had a face tattoo, which Lewis does not have.
“This is the umpteenth time that they have racially profiled someone,” said Rev. Jarrett Maupin, a longtime Valley activist. Maupin said Lewis is the first in a series of people he will bring in front of Phoenix Police Headquarters in the coming weeks to make new complaints about Phoenix police abuse and misconduct.
“There is an endless litany of people who have been maimed, mistreated, and murdered by the Phoenix Police Department, and it really is time for it to come to an end,” Maupin said.
Maupin’s new complaints come as the Department of Justice nears the end of a multi-year pattern of practice investigation of the city of Phoenix. Last week city council members pushed back on the idea that they would accept the DOJ’s conclusions and sign agreements to work toward a consent decree. A consent decree is a negotiated set of reforms to prevent future civil rights violations, and compliance is measured by an appointed independent monitor.
“We're going to bring out somebody every day until the consent decree is signed or until the chief has been fired and they get somebody else in there who's willing to cooperate,” Maupin said.
“We're hopeful that we will be able to clean this up with or without the feds' help, but if the city of Phoenix won't do it, the feds will,” said Joel Robbins, a civil rights attorney representing Lewis.
Robbins is also frustrated by the police department’s lack of transparency about Lewis’s detainment. His firm first asked for police body-camera video of the incident in March. Four days after Lewis spoke with ABC15 and one week before his lawyers were scheduled to go before a judge regarding the video, police released the body-camera footage.
The video showed the incident lasted less than 15 minutes from when police called for the home's occupants to come out to when Lewis was allowed to go back inside. While Lewis walked down the driveway with his hands up, officers started to question aloud whether they had the right guy. Lewis was put in handcuffs for about three minutes, while officers consulted a picture of the suspect on a cell phone.
Lewis’s legal claim asks for a $250,000 settlement.
“It's very important for our community and the police to learn to change, so everyone is treated the same regardless of the color of their skin,” Lewis said.
