By Laura Maggi
The New Orleans Times-Picayune
NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Police Department fired an officer Monday who investigators determined was involved in the beating of a 25-year-old lawyer in the French Quarter late last year, while a sergeant remains under investigation, Superintendent Warren Riley said.
The NOPD investigation determined that Officer Reynolds Rigney Jr., who has been on the force since 2004, committed a second-degree battery upon Ronald Coleman, a New Orleans-based employee of ACORN, an activist group.
“The evidence was sufficient enough to show he did not uphold the standards (of the NOPD),” Riley said. “A battery was committed.”
Police also investigated Sgt. Jake Schnapp Jr. for participating in the same beating, but Riley said he would not disclose his decision about the sergeant’s fate until he returned from a trip out of town.
Both officers were moved to desk jobs after the incident on Dec. 30, when Coleman was walking on Conti Street in the Quarter. They were part of a group of seven plainclothes officers who also were in the area and initially targeted Coleman as a suspect in a pickpocket robbery.
While the officers announced themselves as police, Coleman said, they immediately began punching him and shoved him to the ground. Coleman said the incident left him with bruised ribs, a concussion, and cuts on his face.
In the incident report, Schnapp wrote that officers spotted Coleman after the sergeant had just received a complaint from an elderly man on Conti Street who said he had been pickpocketed by a “black male wearing all black clothing.” Coleman, who is African-American, has said he was wearing navy blue that day.
Two officers went after Coleman, Schnapp wrote, who turned around and did not realize he was being approached by police officers.
“The force in which Ronald Coleman turned, coupled with the fact that the ground was wet and it was raining, caused both the investigator and Ronald Coleman to fall to the ground,” the report noted. It went on to describe Coleman “kicking, screaming, and flailing his arms.”
Schnapp also wrote that the officers told Coleman to “cease his resistance and submit to handcuffing.”
Coleman has said that he took officers’ punches even after he was handcuffed, saying the beating didn’t stop until he yelled out that he is a lawyer. After officers checked his identification, they released him from custody.
According to the police report, a more complete statement was not taken from the man who first reported being pickpocketed. Schnapp described looking for this man after they realized Coleman was not the suspect, but wrote that he “could not be located.”
Although there were seven officers in the group, Riley said that most were quickly cleared of any wrongdoing. The case against Rigney has been referred to the district attorney’s office, he said.
A review of city civil service records showed that Rigney previously had not been disciplined by the police department.
But Schnapp has received both commendations and reprimands in his 17 years on the force. For example, he was investigated three times in 1997: for allegedly using a racial slur, keeping a collection of graphic crime scene photos and manhandling a teenage girl while going after a suspect. Schnapp was suspended for five days in 2003 for causing a car accident with his cruiser.
Copyright 2007 The New Orleans Times-Picayune