Jury Finds White Petersburg Cop Liable for Assaulting a 4′ 9,″ 100lbs Black Woman During a Traffic Stop and Searching her Vehicle/Purse Even Though Neither Could Have Contained Evidence of Speeding

From [HERE] A Black woman was awarded $300,000 because a white Virginia cop violated her civil rights when pulling her over for speeding in 2015, a jury ruled this week.

Monica Cromartie, then 54, was pulled over by Brian Lee Billings, a cop in Petersburg, on Feb. 12, 2015. Minutes later, she was bleeding from her mouth and had suffered several injuries.

At first, Cromartie immediately got out of her car, but Billings told her to get back in, and she complied, according to body-camera video.

Billings asked Cromartie to roll down her window. Cromartie ignored his request, continued talking with someone on the phone and asked Billings to leave her alone.

When Billings stated “I need you to roll down your window” and “Ma’am” knocking on the window a second time, she stated “Hey officer, leave me alone.” With mere seconds passing, Officer Billings overreacted in a hostile and violent fashion, opened the driver’s door and ripped Ms. Cromartie from the car and forced her face-down onto the payment and placed his weight on her back with such force that he injured Ms. Cromartie’s forehead, teeth, lip, right eye and right knee before she was handcuffed and then shackled by the legs by other officers. Officer Billings testified under oath to the magistrate that he “opened the car door, instructed her to get out” which the police videos did not support in order to obtain a warrant for obstruction of justice against her which was later dismissed. The court found the fact that a neutral magistrate issued a warrant was not in this case a clear indication that an officer acted in an objectively reasonable manner, stating “when ‘it is obvious that no reasonably competent officer would have concluded that a warrant should issue,’ the “shield of immunity” otherwise conferred by the warrant will be lost.’”

Cromartie, who is 4-foot-9 and weighs about 100 pounds, was bleeding from her lip when she was handcuffed and forced to sit on the curb, according to images released by her lawyers.

She sued Billings, and a Virginia jury awarded her $23,499 in 2017 but ruled Billings had qualified immunity and therefore certain parts of the lawsuit were invalid, according to the Associated Press. However, Cromartie appealed the ruling and the Supreme Court of Virginia sided with her in 2020, ruling Billings unlawfully searched her vehicle and her purse after handcuffing her.

“Neither her vehicle nor her purse could have contained evidence of speeding,” the court wrote, deciding that Cromartie’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure had been violated and ordering the case back to a lower court.

A jury then awarded Cromartie $300,000 for the civil rights violation, the AP reported.

Cromartie said that after the incident she had twice avoided calling the cops because she feared their response, once during a potential domestic assault from her estranged husband and once when a neighbor approached her house with a baseball bat after arguing with her grandchildren.

Billings retired from the Petersburg Police Department shortly after the incident and was not disciplined by the force in the city of 30,000 people about 25 miles south of Richmond.