D.C Man sues cop for inappropriate anal probe on sidewalk
A man in Washington, DC, is suing a local police officer for allegedly performing an inappropriate and invasive body search during a stop-and-frisk last year.
M.B. Cottingham, 39, claims that while he was being searched, Metropolitan Police Department Officer Sean Lojacono probed his anus and grabbed his genitals in the city’s Bellevue section on Sept. 27th.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Cottingham and his friends were on a sidewalk discussing plans for his birthday when two cop cars pulled up to frisk them. ACLU says the officer violated Cottingham’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
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The officers asked Cottingham and his friends if they had any weapons, and the group responded that they did not. Then Cottingham pulled a legal amount of marijuana from his sock and agreed to let Lojacono pat him down further to avoid a confrontation. ACLU officials said.
In the 2 minute video that captures only a snippet of the encounter an officer is seen pouring out a bottle of alcohol.
But according to ACLU staff attorney Scott Michelman, who is representing Cottingham, that’s when the officer took what should’ve been a routine frisk and turned it into a “shocking and unjustified invasion” of his client’s privacy.
“He stuck his finger in my crack, man,” Cottingham said to his friends during the search, video shows. “Don’t do that, man … I don’t have nothing.”
Cottingham followed the officer’s instructions to squat down to allow the search to continue, but the officer went far beyond the reasonable scope of a pat-down, according to ACLU officials, and jammed his fingers into the man’s buttocks and anus, then grabbed his scrotum.
“Stop fingering me though, bruh,” Cottingham told Lojacano. “You fingering my a–, man.”
“I’m outside your pants, bro,” the officer replied. “Relax.”
“Don’t sit here and finger my a— like that, like I’m not a man,” Cottingham said.
The officer’s actions depicted on the video show a “violation of [his] constitutional rights and basic dignity,” Michelman explained.
“When a routine frisk turns into a search this invasive, the officer is not pursuing a legitimate law enforcement purpose but simply degrading someone and asserting his own power,” Michelman continued in a statement.
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ACLU officials said the department’s chief, Peter Newsham, conceded during a DC Council hearing last week that he saw the video and aggrees the officer had touched Cottingham inappropriately.
After experiencing discomfort in his genital area for weeks, Cottingham now suffers ongoing anxiety, depression and fear of being in public.
“I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” Cottingham said in a statement. “It’s bad enough that members of my community are stopped and frisked by the police all the time. I’ve been frisked many times and even beaten by police. But this officer treated me like I’m not even a human being.”
