Chicago Cop Sentenced To 2 Years For Beating Suspect At A Convenience Store

By Mae Rice in News on Mar 2, 2016 8:54PM

surveillance video still

Police officer Aldo Brown was sentenced to two years in prison Wednesday for beating a suspect at a convenience store in 2012. The altercation that was caught on surveillance camera.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall sentenced Brown on Wednesday, making him the first Chicago police officer to be sentenced to jail time since the video of Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times was released in November.

Brown was convicted of using excessive force against convenience store clerk Jecque Howard in October, though, before the video was released.

Brown happens to share a lawyer with Officer Van Dyke: attorney Daniel Herbert.

In court filings, Herbert represented Brown as a hero for patrolling a crime-stricken South Shore neighborhood—whose endemic violence, Herbert says, has earned it the nickname Terror Town.

"Aldo Brown doesn't go to an office each day, typing emails, participating in meetings or conference calls and thinking about the next run to Starbucks," Herbert said in a recent federal court filing, the Tribune reports. "He starts each shift going into Terror Town, where he is ... the ONLY thing preventing already pervasive violence from completely overtaking the community."

Federal prosecutors countered that really, this was a clear-cut case of police brutality. (They did not mention that simply avoiding Starbucks does not make you above the law.)

"With each baseless and unnecessary strike, (Brown) gave the citizens of Chicago every reason to believe that police officers could not be trusted, were aggressive and abusive," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Romero wrote in a filing last week, according to the Tribune.

Brown was initially convicted of using excessive force after a beating that took place on Sep. 27, 2012, in Omar Salma convenience store on South Coles Avenue.

Brown, a plainclothes cop, arrived at the scene with his partner, based on a tip that drugs were being sold on the premises and the store clerks were acting as lookouts for dealers. They searched the premises and found what they considered marijuana paraphernalia, which Howard said was his.

Brown proceeded to punch Howard in the face, choke him, and kick him.

Howard was not injured beyond bruising and scratching during the attack, and was not handcuffed at the time—he was handcuffed earlier in the video, then released by Brown’s partner, who was not charged.

Brown said he feared for his life because Howard had a gun in his pocket, and a loaded gun was found on him. However, Brown did not try to take possession of the weapon until after the beating, the surveillance tape shows.

Howard sued the city over the incident and got a $100,000 settlement, according to the Tribune.