ST. LOUIS — Several years ago, St. Francois County Sheriff Daniel Bullock offered a snide comment when asked about the federal government refusing to place detainees in his jail because of its notoriously bad conditions.
“I’m not running a Hilton Hotel here,” . It was a dismissive attitude that has come back to bite Bullock on more than one occasion, such as in 2020, when a federal class-action lawsuit was filed against the county, alleging “chronic and systemic problems” at the jail including abuse and death of detainees.
There is a straight line that can be drawn from that ongoing lawsuit to the news that five dangerous detainees escaped from the jail on Tuesday night. All five escapees have dangerous felonies on their record. Their escape was aided by cameras in the facility being down, which is a recurring issue, mentioned in the various lawsuits filed against the facility, because too often, corrections employees at the jail aren’t paying attention when abuse is taking place, like when Billy Ames was left strapped in a restraint chair until he died. The restraint chair is in a cell directly in front of the main intake desk.
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When city and county jails are poorly run, they not only lead to civil rights violations of the people who are entrusted to taxpayers’ care, they can become public safety hazards, such as when St. Francois County inmates escape, or those at the City Justice Center in St. Louis rioted in 2021 outside their cells, starting fires and breaking windows, because jail locks had been broken for years.
In May 2022, the nonprofit law firm ArchCity Defenders — which is also involved in the St. Francois County legal action — filed a class-action lawsuit against the city of St. Louis alleging improper use of force against several detainees. Other local nonprofits involved in the lawsuit include the MacArthur Justice Center and the St. Louis University law clinics.
“We continue to hear overwhelming stories of the same type of grievous mistreatment at CJC,” ArchCity attorney Maureen Hanlon said at the time the lawsuit was filed.
I had heard similar stories. So, I filed a Sunshine Law request with the city seeking monthly reports that outline use of force incidents in the jail. Until late 2021, those reports had been posted online, but they weren’t there anymore. Six months after I filed that request, I haven’t received a single document.
This week, I found out why. They no longer exist. Neither do the videos of many such incidents that are key evidence in the federal lawsuit filed by Hanlon and her colleagues. Hanlon discovered both facts in a deposition of assistant city attorney Eddie Roth, who happens to be a former colleague of mine when we were both editorial writers at the Post-Dispatch. In the deposition, Roth told Hanlon that the city doesn’t have any of the monthly use-of-force reports from 2022, and that the city regularly destroys videos of use-of-force incidents, despite being served with a preservation letter from ArchCity Defenders, a legal step that generally requires a defendant to save records.
That disclosure in Roth’s deposition led to Hanlon filing a motion this week requesting an emergency order from the judge demanding that the city maintain its videos of use-of-force incidents.
“The City of St. Louis is not only withholding evidence in this case; they are destroying it,” attorneys in the case wrote in the brief. “To this day, the City is not saving videos showing use of chemical agents on detainees from deletion.”
That the city of St. Louis is facing accusations of obfuscation when it comes to public records — or those involved in a lawsuit — should not be surprising. Last year, local attorney Elad Gross filed a lawsuit against the city accusing the corrections department of multiple violations of the Sunshine Law. He, too, was seeking information about use-of-force incidents. The city responded to Gross’s lawsuit not with a mea culpa and promise to do better, but with a nasty counter lawsuit meant to have a chilling effect on anybody seeking public information from the city.
Amy Breihan, co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center, called the destruction of videos “shocking and disturbing. … I can honestly say I’ve never encountered this level of evidence destruction in my entire career.”
The administration of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones declined to respond to questions about the motion for an emergency order filed in the class-action lawsuit, as is its practice in pending lawsuits. But at some point, the mayor is going to have to publicly acknowledge the failures of the city’s Division of Corrections, and take direct action to fix them.
After the riots in the jail in 2021, shortly after she took office, Jones visited the City Justice Center and talked about treating detainees with “dignity and respect.”
“As the daughter of someone who was incarcerated, this is personal for me,” she said. “This is someone’s father, someone’s mother, brother … grandfather.”
It was a welcome sentiment, and so much better than the one offered by Bullock in his county. Jail experts will tell you that a well-run jail, one in which the detainees are treated with respect and not abused, is a safer jail, one less likely to have riots or escapes, and thus better protect citizens and taxpayers.
Two years after Jones spoke those words, though, the people fighting for the dignity of those fathers, mothers, brothers and grandfathers can’t get the answers they deserve as a matter of law.
Perhaps a federal judge will connect the mayor’s words to the actions of the city she runs.
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