North Las Vegas Police
Former North Las Vegas Officer Spencer Chase Kinney
Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020 | 6:40 p.m.
By all accounts, the man had stopped resisting North Las Vegas Police officers. A less-lethal foam round, a bite to his arm by a police K-9, and a stun gun had apparently proven effective in resolving the arrest.
“OK señor! OK. OK. OK,” he reportedly said on the afternoon of April 24.
With two officers holding each of his arms, the man was kneeling when Officer Spencer Chase Kinney — with a running head start — kneed the man in the face.
“Oh, I’m broken, I’m broken,” the man is heard saying on body-worn camera footage, according to Kinney’s arrest report.
The man’s head snapped back, creating a “thud” sound and breaking his jaw, police said. The man, whose name was redacted, had stopped fighting the arrest at least 21 seconds before the assault, police said.
Kinney was arrested last week on one count each of battery with substantial bodily harm, oppression under color of office and false report by a police officer. His listed attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Kinney quit the police department on June 24 before an internal investigation was completed. Sometime before, two of his colleagues reported the alleged excessive force, city spokesman Patrick Walker said in a statement.
On Aug. 25, a detective picked up the investigation that triggered the arrest.
The allegations are outlined in the arrest affidavit:
The day of the incident, officers were summoned to a North Las Vegas neighborhood, where there was a report of a man holding a pipe and threatening people.
His parents told officers that their son had showed up uninvited, that he was a regular drug user with “violent tendencies,” and that they were scared he would hurt them at their home.
Police arrived to find a shirtless man swinging a metal rod outside.
He ignored orders to put down the pipe as well as threats that he would be stunned. At one point, he put on a shirt, got into a fighting stance and told officers to release the dog.
An officer fired a foam round, which did little. He took off running until a police dog brought him down. At some point, an officer deployed his stun gun.
After he complied, two officers helped the man to his knees. As they began laying him down on the ground face down, Kinney appears to knee him in the face.
In his incident statement, Kinney said the man was still resisting arrest and that he helped push the man’s head down on the ground, which might have caused him to break his jaw. He noted seeing dry blood inside the man’s mouth.
Officer statements and body-worn cameras suggest that Kinney taunted the man after kneeing him, uttering statements to the effect of “how did you like that a** whooping.”
A close friend of Kinney, also an officer, told the detective that Kinney had asked him if he’d seen the knee.
Later discussing the event, Kinney expressed regret, the detective was told.
The victim spoke to the detective about the “mean” incident he’d endured, which caused him months of pain. “I didn’t like that at all. It’s not OK,” the man said to the officer.
"The North Las Vegas Police Department is committed to upholding justice and the law, and the department denounces any use of excessive force,” Walker, the city spokesman, wrote in an email. “Kinney’s alleged actions are unacceptable and are contrary to how the NLVPD trains its officers."
The police union could not be reached for comment.
