Police Beat Woman, Shackle Her to Hospital Bed for 17 Days
NEWS & POLITICS
March 11, 2013
A landlord from Brooklyn was beaten and then shackled to a hospital bed by New York Police Department officers after cops swarmed her building, according to an account published by the New York Post.
42-year-old Karen Brim, the owner of a building in the Flatbush neighborhood, was shackled to a hospital bed for 17 days after police officers allegedly fractured her leg. The NYPD officers, according to Brim, threw her to the ground and fractured her leg after she questioned the officers as to why they were there. She was charged with assault, resisting arrest and more, and her criminal case is pending. Brim, a single mother, needed multiple surgeries and plates to fix her condition, and is now suing the NYPD over the alleged brutality.
“She was hand- and ankle-cuffed to her hospital bed,” her lawyer, Marshall Bluth, told the New York Post. “They would not allow family or friends to enter. She wasn’t presented before a judicial hearing officer for 17 days. It was pretty egregious.” To enforce their rules, one NYPD officer was posted outside her hospital room. That was possible because the “24-hour standard for arraignment in criminal cases doesn’t apply when defendants are hospitalized,” the Post reports.
The alleged police abuse occurred on April 30, 2012, when four members of the NYPD chased a group of teenagers into Brim’s building as the landlord was mopping. The teenagers were arrested but the charges against them were eventually dropped. Brim says that the police immediately began to get physical, though the cops say Brim was the violent one at first, swinging a broom at one officer. But Brim disputes the police officers’ story.
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