Videotape Is Centerpiece of ‘Victorville 5’ Brutality Lawsuit : Justice: The arrest was recorded by a neighbor. But a lawyer for 6 San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies says the tape doesn’t show all that happened.

It began on a hot summer morning in 1988, when authorities responded to a complaint about an all-night party in a front yard in an otherwise quiet Victorville neighborhood.

When it was over, six San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies had used batons, elbows, fists and chokeholds to restrain five Mexican citizens.

The men claimed police brutality. Deputies said their use of potentially deadly force was justified because one of the men pushed an officer, then grabbed for the guns of two deputies in a scuffle. The others, the deputies said, had tried to come to the man’s aid.

What no one knew is that a next-door neighbor captured part of that explosive confrontation on videotape. Viewings of the tape of that June 30, 1988, incident fueled the anger of the local Latino community.

Now, that four-minute tape--which appears to show several uniformed officers using fists and batons on men who offered little resistance--is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar civil rights lawsuit being tried in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The video camera has long been a tool of law enforcement, as in the FBI’s Abscam sting targeting U.S. congressmen in 1980. But this civil trial represents one of the first uses of a videotape as evidence against police in federal court, said Stephen Yagman, an attorney for the Mexicans, who have become known as the “Victorville Five.”

“We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these officers mercilessly and viciously beat these plaintiffs, injured them, and did that with the knowledge that no one would ever know,” Yagman told jurors in opening statements last week. “And even when the videotape came to light, (San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell) took out his big stamp and stamped it and said (of the deputies’ actions) ‘That’s OK.’ ”

But David D. Lawrence, attorney for the six deputies, contends that the videotape is only a partial account that fails to show the hostile behavior of the five men that led to the deputies’ use of force. Moreover, he says, actions portrayed on the videotape are not what they seem. U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima last week denied Lawrence’s motion to block jurors from viewing the tape.

Latino community activists, meanwhile, see the videotape as the first incontrovertible proof that a pattern of abuse by police exists in San Bernardino County.

“The difference that makes this case of the Victorville Five stand out is the videotape,” said Armando Navarro, executive director of the Institute for Social Justice, a San Bernardino-based civil rights group. “I’ve dealt for 21 years in community activism, but I’ve never had something so classic, showing the violence in living color.”

Also monitoring the trial closely is the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, which has become increasingly active in cases of alleged discrimination against Mexican citizens in the Southland. A representative of the consulate has sat in the courtroom since the trial began last week.

The case “is extremely important,” said acting Consul General Mario Nunez Mariel, who hopes a victory for the plaintiffs will help end what he called violence and discrimination against Mexican citizens by U.S. law enforcement officers. “We think it is the right time for stopping all kinds of abuses and violations of human rights of Mexican citizens in this country,” he said.

Sheriff a Defendant

The defendants in the lawsuit are Sheriff Tidwell, San Bernardino County, Sgt. Tim Miller, Deputies Mark Swagger, Mike Stout and Joe Lee Phillips, and Sgt. John Gocke, who was a deputy at the time. Also named is Deputy Paul Schmidt, who now works for the Nevada County Sheriff’s Department.

Lawrence said the suit seeks $5 million in damages for each of the five plaintiffs--Jose Serrano, his father, Efren, and his brother, Victor, as well as friends Auro Ruiz and Javier Ruelas.

Some elements in the case are not in dispute: The Serrano family and their two friends had been playing loud music and drinking beer in their front yard on 5th Street since 9 p.m. on June 29. A neighbor complained to the Sheriff’s Department that the men were still partying at 10 a.m. the next day and urinating in the yard.

Both sides agree that arriving deputies asked the men to take their party indoors, and that one deputy followed Jose Serrano into his house to persuade him to get the others to comply. Deputy Schmidt also did not leave the house despite Serrano’s repeated requests to do so, until an increasingly irritated Serrano started out the door.

At that point, deputies contend, Jose Serrano shoved the deputy and a struggle ensued. Schmidt testified that when he put his arm around Serrano’s neck in an effort to use a “carotid control hold,” he felt Serrano’s hand reaching for the gun on Schmidt’s right hip.

Deputy Phillips testified that, as Schmidt forced Serrano to the ground, Serrano reached forward for Phillips’ gun and that he shoved Serrano’s arm away and helped Schmidt to handcuff the still-struggling man.

Hearing the commotion, a next-door neighbor known only as “Chava” turned on his video camera and began recording the events through a window of his house. A few days later, he gave the tape to a Latino activist and is now said to be living in Mexico, where he cannot be found.

The videotape begins recording the action at about the time that the two deputies were trying to carry off the handcuffed Jose Serrano, who was clutching a porch railing.

The tape--played, rewound and replayed for jurors repeatedly last week--shows Phillips yanking on a night stick under Serrano’s arm. It also shows Phillips jamming his elbow down between Serrano’s shoulder blades--in an effort, the deputy testified, to release the man’s grasp. At one point, Phillips is heard to say, “Now you’re mine.”

The videotape shows other deputies who had arrived at the scene.

One of them, Deputy Swagger, swings his baton at two seated men--Efren and Victor Serrano, and one blow appears to strike Efren Serrano in the head. But Swagger testified that he struck him in the forearm and legs in an effort to stop the two men, who he claimed were moving forward off a couch to try to help Jose Serrano.

The tape also shows Swagger striking Jose Serrano three times while the latter was on the ground, handcuffed. Swagger testified that the first two blows hit the ground and that he only struck Serrano on the leg once to subdue him.

At another point, Swagger ordered Efren and Victor Serrano to stand, and another deputy ordered them to sit down. The conflicting orders were repeated and one of the deputies pushed the men back down on the couch.

“It was kind of confusing” and demeaning, testified Mary Frances Henry, a neighbor who watched part of the incident from her porch across the street.

The videotape then shows deputies dragging Jose Serrano away.

Yagman said the Serranos and their two friends suffered cuts and bruises as a result of the beatings, which he described as “brutal, unprovoked” attacks. They were not hospitalized.

The attorney also noted that only one of the men was charged in the case. Those charges, he said, stemmed from a small amount of cocaine found in Jose Serrano’s wallet. Yagman told jurors that while the man has pleaded guilty and entered a drug diversion program, Serrano denies that the cocaine was his. Yagman alleged that the cocaine was planted in Serrano’s wallet after it was taken from him.

Yagman contends that the officers had no right to enter Serrano’s house without a warrant and that, at a minimum, they were required to leave after Serrano’s repeated requests. Yagman also contends that the men were doing nothing illegal by drinking on private property and were not required to go inside as deputies had ordered.

Contradictions

The deputies have testified that they were acting within their legal authority throughout the incident.

Much of the questioning in the trial has centered on contradictions in various written and recorded statements made by the deputies to their superiors and during pretrial depositions.

For example, initial written statements made by the officers before the videotape’s existence was made public by Latino activists do not mention some of the blows depicted on the tape. There are further discrepancies between the videotape and subsequent statements to Sheriff’s Department internal affairs officers, Yagman said.

Regardless of the verdict of the four-man, four-woman jury in the case of the Victorville Five, relations between the Sheriff’s Department and Latinos in San Bernardino County have improved dramatically since the 1988 altercation, say Latino activists.

“I think (the videotape of the confrontation) was really the catalyst” for the change, said Felix G. Diaz, a Latino community leader in Victorville and member of the local high school district school board.

“They are doing more now than they ever did before to resolve problems of communication with minority communities,” Diaz said, citing cultural awareness seminars for deputies and community members that the Sheriff’s Department has sponsored in Victorville and elsewhere.