As a result of a grand jury criticizing its “culture of cover-up,” the Kissimmee Police Department said on Friday that it had turned over 15 cases of excessive force and breaking into people’s homes without permission to local and state officials.
The cases involve cops breaking department rules, but they were not given to prosecutors or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement at first, which is against the law.
A letter to Orange-Osceola State Attorney Andrew Bain from October 7 that had not been made public before named the cases. The oldest one, from 2015, involves Officer Matthew Baxter, who was one of two KPD officers killed on the job in 2017.
The letter was sent a week before a grand jury released a shocking report on its probe into Officer Andrew Baseggio, who is being charged with beating a man badly last year. WFTV was the first to report on it, and KPD made it public on Friday.
At least one of the officers named in the letter had already left the service before it came out: He was fired in 2021 after making a series of offensive Facebook posts about police officers who hurt people and backing the uprising at the U.S.
Capitol in 2021, which he called “Day one of the Revolutionary War.” In 2022, he sued his bosses in federal court over being fired, but the terms of the deal were not made public.
The jury found that many past reports of excessive force were filed as minor policy violations, which meant that the cops involved got lighter punishments and the problem was not reported to the right people.
Baseggio was only suspended for eight hours before he was arrested for beating Sean Kastner. Kastner is suing the city, according to City Manager Mike Steigerwald, but court papers could not be found that showed a suit.
When the letter from October 7 was sent, the Police Department knew about the grand jury’s complaints.
The agency said Friday, “The Department knows how important it is to keep the public’s trust and is committed to making continuous improvements, such as updating policies and giving staff more training.”
“Our main goal is to make sure that everything the Kissimmee Police Department does is in line with the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and responsibility.”
Before the grand jury’s report came out to the public in the middle of October, Bain’s office sent Chief Betty Holland a letter saying that 11 current and past officers, including Holland and a deputy chief, would be looked at more closely because of concerns about their honesty in the Baseggio case.
Holland quit his job after more than a year because of the scandal. Maj. Robert Anzueto from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office took over as acting chief.
Anzueto’s job is to clean up the department. The first thing he will do is start official investigations into officers whose behavior the State Attorney’s Office questions.
Police Officer Michael Strickland and Sgt. Raquel Fernandez, who were named in the Oct. 7 letter, are two of them.
The Orlando Sentinel has records of the incidents involving eight of the 15 named officers. These records were received through past requests. The other records are part of a request that was not fulfilled on Friday. Baxter, Fernandez, Sgt.
Christopher Breuer, and Officers Joseph Mata, Jared Binder, Glenn Ford, and Dennis Vazquez are some of the officers whose files the Sentinel does not have.
Three of the eight were suspended: Strickland, Cpl. Marlene Neitzel, and Michael Douvres. Johnson would have been fired, but he quit the KPD before that could happen.
Officers Nawfal Filali, Brandon Salgado, Richard Reyes-Soto, and Bradley Wheeler were the others who got in trouble.
Excessive force incidents
An internal investigation found that in April 2023, Strickland gave a man caught in a department-led bike theft sting three seconds to follow verbal orders before putting a K-9 on him and biting the man on the knee.
This earned him the harshest punishment, a 16-hour suspension instead of the original 24-hour suspension. It was also found that Strickland, who the report said was not part of the sting, turned off the camera on his body as he took the dog off the man. Records show that he was told off for that in person.
Johnson and Douvres looked into a man who was thought to have attacked his mother in November 2020, almost three years before Strickland was suspended. The man was arrested and sitting on a curb.
He kept asking police to let him talk to the victim, who lived in an apartment building next door. He was finally able to get up and run toward his mom’s apartment, but Johnson and Douvres were following him.
The internal investigation into the event said that the cops stopped him from running with Tasers and then dropped him in a grassy area, where he was caught.
Body camera footage and statements from officers at the scene showed that they broke department policy because the suspect “did not display a level of aggressive or aggravated physical resistance while his handcuffs were still behind his back” and as he ran he did not make “threatening or aggressive comments.”
Johnson was fired before he could be punished, but Douvres was put on leave for eight hours.
Two of the officers named in the letter from October 7 were able to escape being fired for using too much force. Wheeler was one of them. This was because, according to records, a man was arrested in September 2020 on charges of stealing from a Walmart while being rude to store workers.
During the fight, Wheeler put his Taser on the man’s chest, then took a step back and shocked him. The officer then took the suspect down and put the Taser on his neck, which the report said “was not a trained technique at the Kissimmee Police Department.”
The man, whose name the Sentinel is not publishing because his case was closed because he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, was choked after trying to grab the Taser.
Wheeler was said to have held the man “just below his ear” until help came, according to the report. Records show that he was later given a written warning.
Filali, the other cop who did not get fired for using too much force, was still being investigated months later. In February 2021, he was called to Walmart to help the Kissimmee Fire Department treat a guy who was having a seizure and was “fighting with his mother.”
The report says that Filali used his Taser for the first time when the man came up to him and was being rude.
The 450-pound man “walked away and got down on one knee” between two parked cars, the report said. He then told him to get down on the ground, but the man asked, “How?” The police officer then used his Taser a second time.
The report said that before the second Taser was used, “the [body-worn camera] video did not show the subject displaying an active physical level of resistance.”
It also said that the man was not “attempting to stand up” before the second Taser was used, even though Filali thought “he would eventually.” Like Wheeler, Filali only got a written warning.
Reports about the acts of other officers named who were accused of using too much force—Baxter, Fernandez, Mata, Binder, Ford, and Vazquez—were not made public.
Illegal entries
In the same year, Neitzel was fired eight hours after she and two other cops, Brandon Salgado and Richard Reyes-Soto, looked into a report of domestic violence. In that March case, the three police officers went into the suspect’s house without an order or permission.
The suspect, who is not named in the internal report, was taken to the front patio during the arrest. There, he “forcefully broke away” from Reyes-Soto, who then used his Taser to catch him.
The report says Neitzel told investigators she thought she had a legal right to enter “based on the safety and wellbeing of the two children in the residence.” But the other two officers never told her that the suspect would not let them in before she got there.
She also said that she would have told them to get an emergency arrest warrant if she had known. After being caught, it is not clear what happened to the subject.
Neitzel was later suspended for eight hours because she was in charge of the scene of the crime. Both Salgado and Reyes-Soto were told off verbally and in writing for not keeping their body cameras on the whole time of the meeting.
Breuer was the other cop accused of breaking in without permission, but his report was not made public right away.