Two Phoenix police officers have been arrested and fired after a violent, “off-the-books” traffic stop in south Phoenix earlier this month, officials said.
It was so violent, in fact, that when a report was made to a different police department, they thought it must have been done by criminals posing as police.
The officers involved — Antonio Felix and Luis Vasquez Jr. — did not activate their body-worn cameras, did not report use of force and left one of the people involved on the side of the road alone, according to police.
ABC15 chief investigative reporter Dave Biscobing broke the story and sat down with Phoenix police Chief Matt Giordano to talk more about how people in south Phoenix can trust the department given its history there and this latest scandal.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Dave. Thanks for coming back on The Show.
DAVE BISCOBING: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so this is a winding story. Start with what we know about this unreported traffic stop. What are the officers accused of doing, exactly?
DAVE BISCOBING: Well, like you just broke down, they apparently rear-ended this car that the victims claim was following them. They claim the police were following them, and then it got very violent. According to the victims, they ripped off a window, Tased them multiple times, held a gun at them, counted down from three after threatening to shoot them.
The man — there’s a man and woman — the man actually, he’s a big guy, he’s listed at 6-some feet, 300-some pounds, got away, and the car drove off while they had the woman, I think, in custody already — or I should say had her handcuffed.
But they left her just on the side of the road, and then the just — police didn’t report this or pretend like it happened at all. And then once the man got into Tempe, he reported what had happened, and they thought, "OK, this had to have been some sort of wild rip or criminals posing as cops." And that’s how this all began.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK, so they didn’t report it. They said actually in court documents after they were arrested that it was because they knew they had broken so many Phoenix PD policies, right?
DAVE BISCOBING: ... That’s their explanation. A lot of their explanation, and it’s not much based on what we’ve seen documented that their side of this was, but it doesn’t really add up when it’s held up to all of the other facts.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so you sat down with Phoenix police Chief Matt Giordano. ... What does he say about what the department’s doing in this particular case and making sure these officers haven’t done this before and it’s never come to light?
DAVE BISCOBING: So his steps he has announced and told us in our interview are to both investigate these officers specifically, kind of scrub down their work history, but then also have their Integrity Unit take a deeper look at the South Mountain Precinct and the unit, etc., to see if there are some systemic issues. So that is what he says they are doing.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. What about other officers at Phoenix PD? I’ve never heard of a so-called off-the-book traffic stop. Is this a thing that happens?
DAVE BISCOBING: I am getting some source information from multiple police sources that indicates that this, while not maybe being carried out in the way that these officers did this quote "off-the-book" stop, there is something known as "ghost stops." And that is that officers, maybe when they don’t want to have to document a stop because they don’t think it’s severe enough or they just don’t want to or for whatever reason, they don’t activate their body cameras, they don’t call it in.
And they maybe are — maybe it's something as innocuous as giving someone kind of just a verbal warning or, in the most extreme senses, what we’re doing here. And I do want to say we use the word traffic stop because that’s how Phoenix has described it, but traffic stop implies there’s some sort of legitimacy that is what happened with these two officers. And as of right now, the evidence does not show that. So that’s just for a lack of a better term.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. You also asked the chief about a string of incidents with other officers at the South Mountain Precinct where these two officers were based. And this precinct in particular seems to have a culture problem. You described it as out of control. What did the chief have to say about that?
DAVE BISCOBING: Well, my sources say that precinct has a reputation from being out of control, right? And this stems back from far to more recent. And we’re talking about Richard Chrisman, who back in 2010 shot a man in the back and was charged with murder, ended up getting I think 10 years in prison for that.
Then right after that, very close, there was another officer, Sean Drenth, who was found dead in a warehouse parking lot area. They’ve never figured out or determined whether or not that was a suicide or a murder, meaning perhaps a cop killed him because they were all involved in an off-duty work scheme. Flash forward to now, we have the sergeant from that precinct who was trying to bait the students at that ICE protest, he was fired. And now we have this.
So I asked the chief, "What is — is there a culture problem here?" He says, "No, I came up through this precinct. There’s a lot of great men and women there." But many in the community in that area, it’s a very divisive relationship between people in south Phoenix and the police department, and there’s no doubt that just pretending that there isn’t an issue is going to allay any of those concerns.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, last minute here, Dave. This is coming after the Phoenix PD and the chief pushed back against the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. They released a scathing report about the department’s use of force and more. The Trump administration dropped that investigation. The Phoenix PD was happy about that. But what does this story say about the kind of debate over that DOJ report and if it should have been closed with no action?
DAVE BISCOBING: For the public, for us in the news who report on Phoenix, for everyone, the question is: How much longer can we take what Phoenix says — leadership at every level from the city manager’s office to the mayor to the council to the police department, and say, "Hey, we can police ourselves," when something like this could happen?
They keep asking for our trust. They keep saying that they can do it. Then why do things like this keep happening? We still have a disproportionate number of police shootings and killings compared to any other major police department in the country. We have these massive scandals, and these things keep happening. And yet they keep asking for trust and patience. And at one point, does that just become — if it isn’t already — just completely hollow?
LAUREN GILGER: ABC15 chief investigative reporter Dave Biscobing joining us. I’m sure he’ll be following this story. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate your reporting here.
DAVE BISCOBING: Thank you.
