Lost in the funhouse at Internal Affairs
By Meliqueica Meadows
Of the St. Louis American
Michele Mihanovich, a former city cop, said that on the evening of May 24 she was the passenger in a car operated by her close friend of four years, an African-American female police officer still serving on the force, who was off-duty at the time.
According to Mihanovich, the pair had just left a bachelorette party in University City to take some food to the officer’s fiancé, also a city cop, who lived near Fairgrounds Park. After a brief visit, the officer decided to show Mihanovich some property she and her fiancé planned to purchase in the Ville neighborhood.
The pair first stopped at 3903 Greer. Since it was late in the evening, sometime around 11 p.m., they simply pulled over to the side of the road to observe the house from the street. After a few moments, they drove off.
“We were headed west on Greer and then made a left onto Bishop L. Scott,” Mihanovich said. After stopping at Maffitt and Bishop L. Scott, she said, the pair eyed a police cruiser with two officers, one white and one African-American, inside.
“We saw a police officer look at her and then look at me,” Mihanovich said. “We went south on Bishop L. Scott, and 10 to 15 seconds later they were behind us.”
The off-duty officer pulled her car, with a personalized license plate, to the curb. With the windows down, both women could hear the officers as they approached the vehicle. The officers were later identified as Martin Garcia and Elmer Morris.
Mihanovich said she heard Garcia say, “I know these plates,” as he walked up on the driver’s side of the car. She said he then called her friend, who was operating the vehicle, by her first name and asked, “Hey, how are you doing?”
The off-duty officer asked why she had been pulled over.
“Um, impeding the flow of traffic,” he allegedly said, but Mihanovich noted that his inflection was more like a question. Meanwhile, Garcia was shining his flashlight into the vehicle.
“While he’s flashing the light in my face, my friend says, ‘She’s my friend,’ Mihanovich said. She added that Garcia then began to fire off a litany of questions.
She said Garcia asked about Mihanovich’s identity, then followed with, “What are you doing in this neighborhood? Does your husband know you’re up here?”
The off-duty officer replied that her reasons for being in the neighborhood were none of his business and asked why he needed the identity of her passenger. The off-duty officer reportedly told Garcia that she knew they had been stopped because they had been racially profiled.
At this point, Morris allegedly walked to the driver’s side of the car and demanded her driver’s license so that he could cite her for impeding the flow of traffic.
“I’m a police officer,” Mihanovich said her friend told Morris. He said, “I don’t care who you are,” as he removed his handcuffs from his belt. He added that she could explain that she was a police officer to Internal Affairs.
It was during this exchange that Garcia allegedly told Morris that the African-American female was indeed a fellow officer. The two returned to their patrol car and left without writing a citation.
Mihanovich and her friend were so disturbed by what took place that they decided to contact Sergeant Ed Pfiefer at North Patrol, who was the direct supervisor of the officers.
Pfiefer said he had been in the back seat of the patrol car that stopped them and that she had indeed impeded the flow of traffic.
Priefer allegedly stated that he became upset because the off-duty officer “used the race card” and that he “can’t stand the race card.” He added that it was not “ordinary for a black person and a white person to be together” before adding, “I mean, not in that neighborhood.”
She said he further stated that he could not believe that she was so upset, because “it was not as if they had been pulled out of the car and cursed at.”
The following day, the off-duty officer submitted a memo to her supervisor, Lt. Joseph Hoeing and was told that his acceptance of the memo made her complaint official and that it would be forwarded to the Internal Affairs Department.
On June 6, the officer was told to contact the District 8 watch commander, Captain Leman Dobbins, about the incident. The officer claims that she was told by Dobbins to “find a new place of employment.” But then he said that he could arrange a meeting to get the two officers to apologize and asked her to have Mihanovich call him.
Mihanovich said that Dobbins said to her over the phone that the officer “needs a different place of employment” and added that “any self-respecting officer in that neighborhood should know that they shouldn’t be in that neighborhood.” He allegedly told Mihanovich that “98 percent of the white people in that neighborhood after 4 p.m. are buying drugs.”
He further stated that the off-duty officer would be “jammed up” because she did not display her credentials to the officer, though he verbally indicated that he recognized the woman from the police academy.
The next day the two were informed by Lt. Janice Bockstruck that a meeting to discuss the matter had been scheduled for June 9 with Major Reggie Harris. The officer obtained legal representation from the St. Louis Police Officer Association’s lawyer Jim Towey.
Garcia said he did not wish to make a statement but would rather speak to a lawyer. When pressed by Harris for his account, Garcia stated that he had observed the off-duty officer and Mihanovich impede the flow of traffic for approximately 10 seconds between Lincoln and Kennerly (not Bishop L. Scott and Greer, where they were stopped).
When asked about the incident and the department’s policies on racial profiling, Schron Jackson of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said, “Michele Mihanovich has not filed a complaint with IAD, and that’s all I can speak to.”
ACLU-EM Racial Justice Manager Redditt Hudson said the incident is a classic example of “cop culture overriding training.”
“The response from leadership in the department to give her stiff necks and straight faces, threats, indifference, contempt and humiliation is arrogant and irresponsible and disgraceful, but unfortunately all too typical of internal department response to complaints from within or without the department,” Hudson said.
Hudson, a former city cop, added this incident is “one of the reasons why the mayor’s opposition to real independent civilian review was such a failure of leadership.”