Women say San Jose police used excessive force on them during

Mardi Gras confrontation

(BEATING VIDEO at Mercury. Did anybody read this in the Mercury News today? All the female students were black & one had a resume that would make most police dept's drool, the article says. All are affilated w/ police work & 1 is the daughter of a 9 yr vet for the dept. The police beat them w/ their billy clubs, etc. GOOD STORY & postings from members in that forum is NOTHING like the ones here. Smart ppl over there at the Mercury.)

 Natasha Burton has a résumé that would make most police departments drool. She headed a youth advisory group for the San Diego Police Department. Her mother was an officer there for nine years. The department's police union gave her a scholarship to San Jose State University, where she graduated with a degree in criminology last spring.

But all the motivation Burton had to become a police officer was shattered, she said, by the blows of police batons on Mardi Gras night 2006.

Burton and three friends who accompanied her that night say they were not part of the celebration — just part of a group that was trying to get back to campus after stopping for burritos.

The young women, who say they had not been drinking, became caught up in a nightmare that is detailed in four pending lawsuits. Before it was over, police had struck Burton and two companions with batons. An officer had used pepper spray against a third member of the group. Burton was handcuffed, arrested and subjected, she said, to comments about coming to San Jose "from Oakland," which Burton, who is African-American, took as a racial slur.

A Bay Area television station, KPIX, videotaped an officer striking one of the women in the back of the legs with a baton, as he was moving her away from the area.

San Jose police will not discuss the incident, other than to say that an excessive force complaint filed by one of the women was "sustained." That is a rare occurrence in a department that has rejected nearly every such complaint in recent years.

Police reports written at the time, however, describe the women as combative and say Burton struck an officer in the chest, which Burton denies. In the pending federal lawsuits, the police contend the force was appropriate.

Like Burton, the others in the group were unlikely candidates for a confrontation with police. The group included Christina Sanchez, who majored in justice studies while working part time for the campus police department. Also in the group was Barbara Powell, who later became president of the Black Student Union.

As the women describe the incident in court documents: They got caught in a phalanx of police assigned to crowd control, while trying to get back to campus. An officer nudged his horse against one member of their group, who then approached a group of officers outside City Hall demanding to know how to file a complaint.

The officers told her to keep walking, then told the others that she was not permitted to be cutting through the grounds of City Hall. Burton went after her. Burton says she was pushed by an officer, heard another officer say she had assaulted an officer and then felt the baton blows. She was tackled in the street, struck again, tightly handcuffed and arrested. Burton said that on her way to jail, the officers accused them of coming from Oakland.

"I felt like I was losing my mind," Burton said of being locked up. "I felt that the system was failing. I believe in cops; my mother was a cop. I have never had an attitude toward cops. It was hard for me to understand how this could happen."

Sanchez said the night "completely changed my view" about becoming an officer. She is now in grad school studying social work.

"I lost trust," Sanchez said. "If I ever had some issue and I need to call a cop because I need help in San Jose, I wouldn't call the San Jose police."

Powell, now 24, who suffered the pepper spray that night, said that when she sees police now, "I go the other way."

Taking her mother's advice, Burton made an official complaint to the department's Internal Affairs unit the following day. Three years later, she says she has never heard a response. Police said they normally send a letter documenting the outcome of a complaint.

Burton eventually pleaded guilty to an infraction, had to pay fees and attend anger management courses. But the memory still humiliates her. Burton said she was denied a job at Santa Clara County's probation department because of the arrest.

"The San Jose Police Department," she said, "needs to change." (And that's why Oakland has John Burris, lol)

Touche' Ernie.  I noticed that line about how he would not have done it if he had known it would net such little profit.  That will probably be how he justifies his continued criminal behavior when he gets out.  In his mind HE was robbed by those victims of his just rewards for all the hard work of smoking a blunt, popping some E, stealing a car and gathering up all his home slices with guns for a night of robbing.