Another Cedar Rapids cop was injured last night when she was trying to break up a fight among four women and fell down some steps. Last night’s incident was the 19th assault on a Cedar Rapids police officer this year.
Two young men from Cedar Rapids accused of assaulting another policeman this past weekend accuse the cops of being "too aggressive." A Cedar Rapids policeman is recovering at home after being punched and kicked by party-goers celebrating a man’s 50th birthday.
Four young men were arrested. Two of them talked with KCRG Television about the incident which started at 3:30 Saturday morning when the next-door neighbor complained about noise from the party. Police checked the party, retreated a few blocks, and the neighbor called police again to complain the party-goers were now pounding on doors and yelling at them.
Party-goer Kenneth Reed, who is 20 years old, suggests police manhandled him.
"They had me handcuffed in my house, but drug me out by my feet," Reed says.
When police first arrived, they asked to enter the party house, but no one would open the door. Twenty-one-year-old Parker Anderson, another one of the men who was arrested, complains about the cops, too.
"They didn’t show us a warrant. They didn’t read us our rights — nothing," Anderson claims. "Like, they didn’t follow procedure at all."
Sergeant Cristy Hamblin, a spokeswoman for the Cedar Rapids Police Department, says the whole incident could have been avoided if the party-goers had let police in the house when cops first arrived.
"They could have gone on doing whatever they were doing in the house but, instead, they didn’t think through all the consequences through and they spent the night in jail," Hamblin says.
Reed says he never thought his dad’s 50th birthday would turn out this way.
"I did get a couple, like, knees in the back that I didn’t really deserve, like, you know what I’m saying?" Reed says. "I was being really cooperative except for not letting them in my house without a warrant."
Hamblin, the spokeswoman for the Cedar Rapids Police Department, suggests all of this could have been avoided if party-goers had been cooperative rather than combative.
"When you assault an officer, it’s really almost that you’re assaulting the public as well because that’s who we’re representing," she says.
A Cedar Rapids policeman who was assaulted in March is still in the hospital, recovering slowly from his severe injuries. The 16-year-old accused of that assault is appearing in court this morning and a judge will decide whether he’ll stand trial as an adult or a juvenile.