Former cop sentenced to three years

By Charles Sercombe
A former Hamtramck police officer, charged with assaulting two people he arrested back in 2014, will be going to federal prison.
Ryan McInerney, 45, of Grosse Ile Twp., was charged with the crimes back in 2018, and recently pled guilty to using excessive force, and to violating the civil rights of one victim.
The matter was resolved in a plea deal with the US Justice Department.
He will be serving three years in a federal prison, followed by three years of probation. He also agreed to surrender his law enforcement license.
He was facing a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each incident.
The incidents occurred on July 22, 2014, and involved two separate arrests.
In both incidents, McInerney first pulled over drivers, then pistol whipped them. In both cases, neither driver provoked the attack.
In the first incident, the driver suffered broken facial bones, and in the second incident, some of the man’s teeth were broken.
Not only that, McInerney also falsified his reports in the incidents.
“Police officers take an oath to protect, serve, and uphold the law. When an officer betrays that oath by violating a person’s civil rights, the FBI will make it a priority to hold the officer accountable,” said Timothy Waters, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Michigan, in a statement issued by the Justice Department.
“Ryan McInerney’s actions were a betrayal of the trust his community placed in him and are not reflective of the honorable way in which the men and women of the Hamtramck Police Department work to keep their community safe.”
Posted Sept. 17, 2021

One Response to Former cop sentenced to three years

  1. Mark M Koroi

    September 18, 2021 at 12:35 am

    Several points need to be mentioned:

    (A) Officer McInerney was never fired from the City of Hamtramck but voluntarily agreed to separate from the HPD after being placed upon administrative leave – he later found employment as a railroad police officer;

    (B) the Fieger Law Firm sued McInerney and the City of Hamtramck for assaulting Jibreel Amin Montalvo, one of the victims in the criminal case, and the the matter was settled in federal court;

    (C) the City of Hamtramck expended funds initially to City Attorney John Clark to appear on McInerney’s behalf in the civil rights damages action brought by Montalvo and later paid the McGraw Morris law firm to defend McInerney in the civil rights damages action;

    (D) the City of Hamtramck continued to pay McGraw Morris to continue to defend McInerney in the civil rights damages action – even after McInerney was indicted by a federal grand jury for criminal civil rights violations in late 2018;

    (E) it is questionable why the City of Hamtramck would pay for the legal defense of a former police officer in a civil rights damages action even after he was charged criminally in U.S. District Court arising out of he same conduct – did the collective bargaining agreement of McInerney’s union require the providing by the city of a such a legal defense in a civil proceeding?

    (F) how much did the City of Hamtramck and/or its liability insurer pay Jibreel Amin Montalvo and the Fieger Law Firm to settle the civil rights damages action based upon his assault by McInerney?

    The facts of these two assault incidents need to be explored publicly and factually developed. The H.P.D. needs to learn how such events could have occurred and what can be done in the future to prevent such occurrences.

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