Via a press release, Sullivan announced that the three cops involved in the brutal 2024 attack on Tyron McAlpin would be getting a day off from work — albeit without pay. All three would be issued "24-hour unpaid suspensions" for unnamed "policy violations," the release stated. Two officers will be "required to attend additional de-escalation training." The media advisory did not identify the officers, nor did it state which officer gets to skip de-escalation training.
"We understand the concerns raised by this incident, and we take them seriously," Sullivan said in the release. "The decision to suspend the officers reflects our commitment to accountability and maintaining public trust."
But community activists and advocates for criminal justice reform say Sullivan's time-out for his officers sends a different message: that Phoenix cops can manhandle the most vulnerable members of society with near impunity, even when their ill deeds are captured on camera and broadcast worldwide.
Elizabeth Venable, a social justice advocate with the Phoenix group Fund for Empowerment, helped the U.S. Department of Justice reach witnesses for its scathing June 2024 report on Phoenix police's discrimination toward minorities and unnecessary use of excessive force, including deadly force.
She noted the irony of the 24-hour suspensions, when McAlpin spent 24 days in county lockup on bogus charges ginned up by the same officers. She called it a "failure of internal responsibility" for violent misconduct that was caught on video by the officers' body-worn cameras.
"They're essentially receiving no punishment whatsoever, besides losing a day's pay," Venable said. "And I think they can afford it."
She pointed to the egregiousness of McAlpin's mistreatment captured on video, first broadcast by ABC 15. If not for that footage, the whole thing "might have been completely swept under the rug," Venable said. Instead, the video went viral and helped "change the narrative" around police brutality.
ABC 15 aired the video just a few months after the DOJ released its caustic, 126-page report, and the broadcast seemed to confirm the report's myriad tales of unconstitutional policing.
The video from police-worn cameras showed officers Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue responding to a 911 call about a white man causing a disturbance at a Circle K near Indian School Road and 10th Street. Harris and Sue questioned the man as if he were the victim and bought his tale of having been assaulted by McAlpin, who was walking away from the Circle K.
The officers took off after McAlpin, jumped him without warning and wailed on him repeatedly, deploying a Taser multiple times into his abdomen as he moaned and screamed. They falsely charged him with resisting arrest, theft and aggravated assault. McAlpin was in jail for 24 days before the outcry over the ABC 15 report forced Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell to drop the charges.
Deeper issues
McAlpin is now suing Phoenix in federal court after hitting the city with a $3.5 million notice of claim. The lawsuit named Sue and Harris as defendants along with officer Jorge Acosta, who the suit says "wrote a false report and probable cause statement to charge Tyron with stealing his own cell phone."The abuse McAlpin sustained was consistent with the DOJ report, which documented the department's pattern of abusing the disabled. It described one encounter with Phoenix cops eerily similar to McAlpin's, wherein police "pressed a deaf man's neck and head down for 20 minutes" after restraining him. The officers continued to shout and threaten the man after they were informed he was deaf.
Even one of the on-air personalities of Phoenix's rabidly pro-cop talk radio station, KTAR, found McAlpin's treatment to be abhorrent.
"Everything they did in this video is exactly what the DOJ report is accusing the Phoenix police department of doing," said Bruce St. James of KTAR's "Bruce and Gaydos" during a show after the video was published. "They literally became an example of it."
Longtime criminal justice reform advocate Caroline Isaacs, executive director of the group Just Communities Arizona, also called bullshit on Sullivan's announcement. In the short term, she said, it tells vulnerable communities that cops can victimize them without consequence.
"In the long range, there is no suspension, there is no retraining, there is no discipline that can root out the deep systemic problems in every single police department that inevitably lead to these kinds of abuses," she said.
Sullivan has been the department's version of a substitute teacher since October 2022, when he replaced scandal-ridden former chief Jeri Williams. And though he's undertaken reforms, including instituting a new use-of-force policy, he's unpopular with the rank-and-file.
Notably, the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the city's police union, issued a statement in support of the officers once McAlpin's arrest footage went viral. After Mitchell's office dropped the charges against McAlpin, PLEA blasted the decision. The organization has not yet commented on the suspensions.
The defense of obvious police misconduct, and Sullivan's rap on the wrists of the officers involved, suggests the problem with Phoenix police isn't the need for a reworded use-of-force policy.
"There's training and then there's culture," Isaacs said, "and what you have (with Phoenix police) is a toxic culture."
