From the New Times Blog:
Ersula Ore, the assistant professor at Arizona State University whose violent arrest became national news because of a viral video, was sentenced today to nine months’ supervised probation.
Ore pleaded guilty earlier this month to one count of passively resisting arrest, a misdemeanor. She’d been charged originally by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office with three misdemeanor counts and one felony count of aggravated assault on a police officer related to the May 20 arrest.
On that evening, Ore had been walking on College Avenue near Fifth Street when Stewart Ferrin, a rookie ASU police officer, admonished her for walking in the street. She perceived his attitude as rude, and gave him some guff. For her troubles, she soon found herself being thrown to the ground and handcuffed as Ferrin arrested her. She can be seen on the video resisting Ferrin’s efforts to handcuff her, and launching a small kick to Ferrin’s legs. The video makes Ferrin look bad, too, as we’ve pointed out previously, due to his overreaction on a mere jaywalking stop, and inability — “I’m going to slam you on this car” — to handle Ore in gentlemanly fashion.
Video of the arrest by ASU police officer Stewart Ferrin was shared broadly on the Internet after Channel 3 News (KTVK-TV) first aired it in late June, inciting many viewers who believed Ore had suffered police brutality. Under public pressure, ASU officials — who had previously found that Ferrin acted appropriately — put Ferrin on administrative leave and asked the FBI to investigate the case for potential civil-rights violations.
Two weeks of bad publicity received by ASU was followed by the unexpected departures of ASU Police Chief John Pickens and Assistant Chief James Hardina. ASU claimed, unbelievably, that the departures had nothing to do with Ore.
As of Thursday, Ferrin was still on leave, ASU spokeswoman Sharon Keeler told New Times.
Also on Thursday, a website called “Down and Drought” published an article by an anonymous author that highlights the apparent responses of police officers to the Ore case. “Agualarchy,” (who could be John Huppenthal for all we know), also criticizes New Times for predicting that Ore won’t make good on her threat to “sue the (bleep) out of the officer,” and for failing to mention old, debunked allegations against Ferrin’s father, John Ferrin in our previous articles about Ore.
With Ferrin on leave, the departures of ASU’s top brass unexplained, and the FBI investigation unfinished, you can expect to hear some more in the near future on this widely publicized case.
The Phoenix New Times writer, Ray Stern, hit the nail right on the head when it comes to the Ore snafu; after initially standing behind Officer Ferrin following the arrest of Professor Ore, ASU later threw Ferrin under the bus due to mounting public pressure. The university’s attempts to explain the ousting both Chief Pickens and Assistant Chief Hardina as unrelated to Ore’s arrest were both comical and unbelievable; apparently, ASUPD had gotten so accustomed to presenting half-truths to members of the department (where any dissenting opinion is quashed immediately), they wrongly assumed the general public would fall for the same line.
While Ore’s criminal case is finished, the entire saga at ASU is far from over; the disposition of Officer Ferrin’s career has yet to be determined. Ferrin was reportedly asked to resign his position as a peace officer so that ASUPD could forgo the formality of doing an actual “investigation” (smartly, Ferrin told ASUPD to pound sand). Both the FBI and DPS’ investigations into wrong-doing on the part of Officer Ferrin are ongoing, with no end in sight.
ASUPD remains shell-shocked following the purge of Pickens and Hardina, and continues to fall apart (albeit more slowly) as another school year begins. ASU’s administration is now micromanaging the departmen to prevent the university from experiencing another PR meltdown–essentially making Interim Chief Thompson a powerless talking head.
With this whole debacle fresh in the public’s mind, you can be certain that any further scandals coming out about ASUPD will surely mean the end of the Michael Crow-era at ASU (we heard McDonald’s is always hiring, sir).
Having your day in State court and having the FBI investigate a stop you made months ago is one thing. Unfortunately our Officer Ferrin will have the unofficial kangaroo court of Arizona State University meddling in this situation because the court, county attorney, and their own previous inquiry and approval wasn’t good enough. He didn’t handle the call the way I would have, but he doesn’t have my experience either. Time will tell if Michael Crow and his lieutenants can resist the peer pressure.
Exactly!
I’m sorry, but this clash of egos is making the university administration look like incompetant assholes. Half the government finds Ore guilty and the other half is on a fault finding expedition to punish Ferrin. Anyone thinking of applying to be an officer before failing out of another agency needs to look at this. ASU will always be hiring for officers. Always.
Waffles, waffles, waffles. They can’t stick to their original finding because their colleagues in the ivory tower are crying, “Oh the humanity.” I would have handled myself differently.
I typically side against escalating unless necessary, but look at some of the jackoffs who trained him. They escalate everything. The only reason this is in the spotlight is because she was vocal and filed a complaint.
How many times have we heard one another hear about what Tempe nights did lately in disbelief over the years? Lots. Did people file complaints? Rarely. Do people know their own rights? Occasionally.
They want to appeal to everyone and stand for nothing with their politically correct garbage. They desperately need officers for years, but are in the process of proving they will not back any of us up if anything we do gets media attention.
What a great example we are setting, resist and assault our police on everything, internationally embarrass this university, get convicted in a court of law, but as learned academics we will punish the officer based on the findings of the Gerry Springer Court and have your job waiting for you when you return.
I feel sorry for Ferrin. He is one officer that goes out and does his job night after night. The officers he is stuck with are part of the “clique”. Now since that sack of shit took over as chief don’t expect him to defend Ferrin, he was probably the one who told him to resign. I am happy as hell to hear that he told them to pound sand.
I am glad I am no longer working there with all of the shady shit that goes on , on that 3rd floor every single person needs to be terminated from the Sgts all the way up to the sack of shit Thompson.
What a mess. There are some good officers there and I have no clue how they are able to take the drama with almost no man power there. Boys a lot of respect to you, the good guys.
To the rest and hopefully soon to be terminated or magically retire out of nowhere try becoming a security guard or better yet McDonald’s is hiring people to clean restrooms and cook fries.
I think ASUPD is better under Thompson than it ever was under Pickens. Pickens would give his token lackeys the highest evaluations, merit raises, protected them no matter how shitty to employees they were, and it took years to ruin this agency. It will take some time to fix it.
Despite this view I agree with you, all of command needs to be replaced because they never took corrective action on issues that needed their attention. They don’t even act as if they give a shit about other people unless their fucking job is on the line.
The change in appearances were like night and day once the two biggest blockages were dislodged from office only because they’re afraid for themselves finally. How many employees have we gone through for this to happen?!?
So you don’t believe the chief wanted to give up power and that AC Hardweiner left a six figure job six years short of retirement to pursue geriatric athletic competition and start a business with his wife?
Nobody else believes it either.
I feel sorry for Ferrin to, but he truly has no discretion. He’s not a rascist, he would have done the same thing to a white lady, but you have to pick your battles.
Why pick this battle if you are trying to escape ASUPD like so many of our young officers who want a career in law enforcement? Not productive. This battle should have been a quick public service message, not a protracted altercation where you are guaranteed a complaint and castrate your career. The cities usually support their cops while the university tolerates us as a necessary evil.
Just saw this in the news about staffing issues.
http://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/asu-will-soon-pay-for-extra-patrol-at-football-games
Currently ASU has 78 patrol officers, which is less than the recommended amount for the size of the university.
The 78 officers cover all of ASU’s Tempe, Polytechnic, Downtown Phoenix, and West campuses.
According to the President of International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA) David Perry, universities are encouraged to follow the same FBI formula for staffing that other city police departments follow. Essentially it’s 2.1 officers per 1,000 students.
An interesting read to be sure.
The Ore Snafu is just one thing out of many things going on that show how assbackwards the Arizona State University Police Department has become. The stories keep breaking and it’s no accident.
This department could be a great place to work if it’s management didn’t spend crucial years giving themselves and their buddies special treatment, promotions over qualified candidates, unearned perks, raises, while using the rest of the agency as a urinal to boost their inflated egos.
Don’t forget the continued exodus of talent to other agencies. Our turnover rate is insane! We waste so much money on training because nobody wanted to put up with the asshole firearms gang and their hierarchy of middle management control.
https://network23.org/theintegrityreport/2014/03/14/asupds-firearms-training-is-far-from-professional/#comments
This is evidence we have too many high priced state university administration people because they don’t have enough to do if they can look for ways to second guess the state judicial system and make their own contradictory rulings on issues.
The only positive outcome of the Ore Snafu is that there has been a lot of attention drawn to how broken the ASUPD is. This is no accident. A broken top heavy police department doesn’t find any more crime than what is reported.
It makes a university appear safer than it really is. M Rourke was over Clery as a commander and willfully left out city stats stating they were unable to convert the data for mandated federal Clery reporting. Integrity matters.
I haven’t seen any news reports of what ever happened to officer Ferrin. Anyone know?
This happens a lot. An interesting news item circulates, and then you never hear the outcome.
Last we heard is that the university asked Ferrin to quit, and he (rightfully) refused; he is still on paid admin leave. The FBI investigation inquiry into the situation is still ongoing. We wouldn’t be surprised if the department attempted to fire Ferrin for something completely unrelated to this to appease the masses.
The ASU police department has a way of piling up quite a number of internally generated internal affairs on it’s officers and there is no threshold of what constitutes one. Command will pick and choose who gets IA’ed and who doesn’t, they protect their friends, and overlook serious issues with one person while focussing on another for nonsense.
In a competently run police department these “IA’s” are typically complaints from the public or involve serious use of force issues, breaking the law, or unethical conduct that costs an officer his/her certification. In comparison ASUPD does IA’s on officers for something as trivial as not remembering to submit a time card. In fact most are trivial and few involve complaints from the public.
What’s most likely happening is ASU is waiting for this issue to die down as the unscrupulous lackey ASUPD command fabricate a paper pile against Officer Ferrin to justify his termination and appease the Michael Crow publicity train that will most likely derail over the coming year due to insufficient changes, ignored problems, and problem people at the department. We’ll see.
The ASU police department has a way of piling up quite a number of internally generated internal affairs on it’s officers and there is no threshold of what constitutes one. Command will pick and choose who gets IA’ed and who doesn’t, they protect their friends, and overlook serious issues with one person while focussing on another for nonsense.
In a competently run police department these “IA’s” are typically complaints from the public or involve serious use of force issues, breaking the law, or unethical conduct that costs an officer his/her certification. In comparison ASUPD does IA’s on officers for something as trivial as not remembering to submit a time card. In fact most are trivial and few involve complaints from the public.
What’s most likely happening is ASU is waiting for this issue to die down as the unscrupulous lackey ASUPD command fabricate a paper pile against Officer Ferrin to justify his termination and appease the Michael Crow publicity train that will most likely derail over the coming year due to insufficient changes, ignored problems, and problem people at the department. We’ll see.
Just checking in to see if there is any news about Officer Ferrin. Is he back on campus? What happened with the investigation? I bet the University is just letting a lot of time slip by so that this debacle is forgotten.
Howard, we haven’t heard anything other than he’s been on admin leave with pay for months, they called him trying to get him to voluntarily resign and he declined, beyond that we don’t know.
We have mandatory “How to be nice to others training” coming up. The commonly held belief is that they will wait for the publicity dies down and bring him back knowing that we desperately need officers to stay and after all the publicity he won’t be able to leave for another agency like so many others who put in a year or less and bounce.
Just checking in again. Hope I’m not being a bore or a troll. Curious if Ferrin is back on the force or still sitting at home or looking for a new job.
Anyone know?
Howard, he’s been cleared by every government agency, state and federal, that could be called on to give their opinion on this matter, including the Arizona State University and his own police department. He’s currently on paid admin leave enjoying the longest vacation in department history.
What’s probably going to happen is anyone’s guess. It depends on how far the university is willing to push it’s reversed agenda and how deep it’s pockets are with public money to arrange for a settlement. The university has paid out handsome sums of public money for a great number of things, after all it’s their reputation and not their money.
Because the university is navigating political waters, stopped hiring officers, we are still understaffed. Poor staffing for police officers means we are all unsafe. I can see you are concerned about public safety and we need more people like that, so please apply. For some reason we’re always hiring, but so is McDonald’s.
Hopefully Officer Ferrin has a good lawyer that will negotiate a nice settlement for him since it’s obvious top-level Arizona State University administrators don’t want him affiliated with the university even after reportedly being completely exonerated except in the PR realm.
Officer Stewart Ferrin on administrative leave for over 5-months is now facing termination proceedings by Arizona State University.
For more information, go to azcentral.com: “ASU moves to fire police officer who arrested professor.”
The article is by Anne Ryman and is dated: 01/07/2015.
Do I have this right? ASUPD chain of command and ASU General Counsel reviewed this arrest the day after it occurred and found no wrong doing on the part of the officer and then 6 weeks later when the media storm hit they put him on leave for 6 months and now are trying fire him?
Someone please explain to me what new facts emerged regarding the arrest that necessitates his termination. Dare I say none?
Left wing liberalism once again kicks justice to the curb.