Docs show Bakersfield police broke bones in 31 people
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) — On Nov. 24, 2017, Robert Cruz Jr. biked north along Baker Street, on a quiet block straddling Bakersfield’s once-thriving old town and struggling new, restaurants interspersed with a rehab center and a prepaid phone store.
A little before midnight, two officers noticed that the 37-yearold Cruz didn’t have a front light on his bicycle. A patrol officer chased Cruz to a nearby yard. There, Cruz crouched behind a child’s play tunnel, and the officer struck his arm with a baton.
According to a police report, Cruz shouted “I didn’t do anything” twice before the officer struck again. The patrolmen arrested Cruz for assaulting an officer, resisting arrest and for the missing bike light. Before taking him to jail, an ambulance brought Cruz to the hospital, a bone sticking out of his skin.
Between 2016 and 2019, Bakersfield police officers used force that broke at least 45 bones in 31 people, according to an analysis of public records by the California Reporting Project. The city of Bakersfield released the documents under a recent California law that increases transparency in policing.
The records released include those cases that involved serious injury or death. A third of the time, injuries reported included one or more broken bones.
Besides Cruz, two other bicyclists stopped by patrol officers for code violations suffered broken bones during that four-year period. They also ended up at the hospital, one with head fractures, the other a broken leg.
Some of the 31 people were later convicted of serious crimes, but an analysis of police reports reveals that others had charges dismissed, or never faced charges at all.
While wrestling in a pile of blankets with a 57- year- old woman who was suspected of trespassing in a Greyhound station, officers broke her wrist. And when one man allegedly violated the city’s curfew in Martin Luther King Jr. Park, officers tasered and hit him with a baton, breaking his leg.
In all 31 cases involving broken bones, the Bakersfield Police Department determined that none of the officers involved violated departmental policy.
Breaking a bone is a brutal act, said Bakersfield Police Sgt. Robert Pair, a spokesman for the department. But it’s also not unusual.
“It’s the unfortunate reality that force is sometimes used in defense of officers and others, and that’s the world we live in,” Pair said. “I don’t think that that is an alarming number at all.”
The number of broken bones is disturbing to Stephanie Padilla, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
“I do think that is high, and I do think that is a really troubling number that one out of three (serious) use-of-force cases result in broken bones,” Padilla said. “It tracks what individuals in the community have shared with us.”
On Wednesday, the Bakersfield City Council unanimously approved $133 million for policing next year, an increase of $13 million. The meeting was raucous and at one point the chamber was cleared after members of the crowd chanted in support of a speaker critical of the police department. The budget hike raises the department’s share to 42% of the city budget and adds 28 police officers.
The council’s budget hearings are the latest venue for a public debate about the quality of policing in Bakersfield, where voters narrowly approved a 1% sales tax increase to boost funding for essential services three years ago.
The city pitched the sales tax as a public safety measure, but residents of Bakersfield still disagree about how best to keep the public safe. The Police Department has proposed hiring 100 officers within three years.
But it remains the target of a California Department of Justice investigation opened more than four years ago by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris. Demands for policing reforms — including defunding or even abolishing the department — accelerated during Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
“I think we stand on the precipice of a critical juncture, a critical moment here in Bakersfield and in Kern County,” said Traco Matthews, a local Black civic leader and chief program officer at the nonprofit Community Action Partnership of Kern.
Matthews co-chairs an independent committee convened by the City Council that has offered recommendations for police reform.
“Can we get to a place where use-of-force incidents, especially serious use-of-force incidents, are less and the public is still safe? And every citizen, every resident, feels like they are part of this family of Bakersfield being protected and served by BPD? Absolutely,” he said.