Wave Wire Services
LOS ANGELES — Relatives of Keenan Anderson, a Black man who went into cardiac arrest and died after being shot with a stun gun multiple times in a struggle with Los Angeles police in Venice in 2023, won a round in court when a judge ruled they can proceed to trial with most of the allegations in their lawsuit.
Anderson, the father of a son now 8 years old, had been a teacher for more than eight years, including at Digital Pioneers Academy, a charter high school in Washington, D.C. The 31-year-old Anderson had been in the Los Angeles area visiting relatives during the holidays when he got into the Jan. 3, 2023, confrontation with police following a minor traffic collision near Lincoln and Venice boulevards.
The family dropped the city and some individual defendants from their lawsuit in July 2024. On July 22, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Upinder S. Kalra denied a motion to dismiss the family’s case against two LAPD officers allegedly involved in the altercation with Anderson.
However, the judge did toss out the plaintiffs’ false imprisonment claim. The suit will go to trial on their causes of action for assault and battery, negligence and civil rights violations.
The family’s attorneys said police used a stun gun on Anderson six times, causing his heart to later flutter and ultimately fail. He died hours later at a hospital.
“This case asks not whether officers were justified in using force, but whether each successive application of force remained justified as the encounter unfolded,” the plaintiff’s lawyers stated in their pleadings.
A person may be intoxicated, mentally compromised and difficult to arrest, but none of those conditions relieves officers of their continuing constitutional obligation to reassess whether each additional use of force remains objectively reasonable, and the same is true of LAPD policy, according to the family’s attorneys’ court papers.
In their court papers, attorneys for the two LAPD officers denied excessive force was used.
“Mr. Anderson’s death four hours after his encounter with the police was a tragedy,” the officers’ attorneys state in their court papers. “However, tragedy does not equal liability. Here, the officers had probable cause to arrest Mr. Anderson. When they attempted to do so, they were met with violent resistance in the middle of a busy city street.”
The less-than-lethal force choices, including the stun gun, were reasonable under the totality of the circumstances and therefore were not excessive force, according to the officers’ attorneys’ court papers.
In 2023, the LAPD released some edited body-camera footage showing the encounter between Anderson and police. At one point, the video shows Anderson being held down on the ground, crying out that officers were trying to “George Floyd” him, a reference to the man who died while being restrained by police in Minneapolis.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers, issued a statement saying Anderson escalated the confrontation with his behavior, which included running away from officers into traffic.
“Minor auto accidents are usually handled with an exchange of information between the drivers and a call to one’s insurance carrier,” the league said in a statement. “On the other hand, when an individual who is high on cocaine is in an accident, tries to open the car door of an innocent driver, and then flees the scene by running into traffic, police officers must act.”
The suit was filed in June 2023 and seeks unspecified damages, although attorneys said they would ask for damages of $100 million. The family had earlier filed a required damages claim against the city seeking $50 million, but it was rejected.
Anderson was one of three men who died in confrontations with the LAPD during the first three days of 2023. The two other men were fatally shot.
The deaths prompted a series of protests, demands for the ouster of then-LAPD Chief Michel Moore and calls for changes in the way the agency responds to traffic crashes.
Anderson was a cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a separate ruling July 22, the judge denied a plaintiffs’ motion to depose Moore. The family maintained Moore had unique knowledge about the Anderson case having reviewed the investigative record, evaluated the evidence and approved the LAPD’s official findings regarding the incident.
