Report of the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights on the Activities of the National Mechanism for the Prevention ...
they were in the bathroom, the bleeding detainee fainted. The officer told
the other man to pull his friend along the floor into the room. When he was
doing this, the officer kicked both detainees. When they were back in the
room, the officers decided to transfer the detainees to a sobering-up facility.
The records of the detainees’ transfer to the facility, drawn up by the officers,
contained no mention of the injuries.
Notably, the officer who used torture against the detained men has been
convicted not only for using it in that specific case, but also for the abuse of
powers (Article 231 of the PC) during an intervention at a private flat against
a man who resisted the officer and tried to attack him with a knife. During the incident, the detained man fell on the floor after one of the officers
kicked him. He was then handcuffed with the hands on his back. He tried
to kick the officers, so they placed a ladder on his legs, and then kicked him
and beat him with a truncheon all over the body. As a result of the kicking,
a hole was made in a wall of the room in which the man was detained. After
leaving the flat, the officers called an ambulance. A doctor who examined
the detainee noticed several bruises and bleeding from the nostrils, but the
patient made it impossible to continue the examination. After the detainee
was transported to the sobering-up facility, he lost his consciousness. Thus,
he was transported to hospital and thoroughly examined. In the course of
the later interrogation regarding the abuse of powers by the police officers, the doctor from the hospital emergency unit, who examined the man
brought from the sobering-up facility, explained that the man looked as if
someone had beaten him all around his body, place after place. Probably with
a truncheon, as the marks were very specific, typical of a longitudinal object,
they were about 20-30 cm long and 4-5 cm wide. Taking into account that in
both cases physical violence was used by the same officer, as well as the type
of acts committed against the detainees and the scale of physical injuries
caused by him, in the opinion of the NMPT representatives the police officer
has obvious problems with aggression. He was, notably, sentenced to 1 year
and 6 months of imprisonment, suspended conditionally for 2 years, and
was prohibited to work as police officer for 2 years.
The cases of torture were reported to have taken place within the premises of police units.
Only in two cases, the victims of torture actively resisted the officers during the police interventions (tried to escape, refused to get into a police car,
refused to leave the apartment, attacked a police officer with a knife). In the
other cases the courts, during the proceedings, confirmed that the victims
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