Christmas came early for Mesa man Cole Spencer after he won a $150,000 settlement for police brutality without being represented by a lawyer. While his case has had a remarkable outcome, it also shows the difficulties faced by ordinary Americans who are victims of officer misconduct.
In 2018, Mesa officers stopped a car Mr. Spencer was riding in. Though Mr. Spencer made the poor decisions to give a false name and then push one of the officers, the police reacted with extreme violence. Bodycam footage started just in time to capture one officer dousing Mr. Spencer’s face with pepper spray as another, SWAT Officer Aaron Pew, squeezed his neck from behind, hoping to make him pass out. After officers handcuffed Mr. Spencer, he said he couldn’t breathe. Officer Pew responded by moving his knee on Mr. Spencer’s neck and saying, “What part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?”
Mr. Spencer spent three days in the hospital. Then, prosecutors got him to plead guilty to assaulting one of the officers in exchange for lenient treatment on unrelated burglary charges.
This sort of unfair plea bargaining often blocks wrongful police conduct from court scrutiny, and after Mr. Spencer went to prison, he appeared to be out of options, as he could not find a civil rights attorney to represent him. But despite not having finished high school, he handwrote a federal lawsuit.
He lost at the US district court when the judge granted the officers “qualified immunity,” a court-made obstacle that blocks people from recovering for rights violations in almost any case unless a court, in a nearly identical lawsuit, had already warned officials that their actions were illegal. It protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”
Mr. Spencer did not give up. He asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review his case, and that court denied qualified immunity to Officer Pew, holding that any reasonable officer would deem excessive “full-body-weight compression of a then largely compliant, prone, and handcuffed individual, despite his pleas for air.”
Following the ruling, the City of Mesa settled the case by paying Mr. Spencer $150,000.
Mr. Spencer, who has been convicted of aggravated assault on an officer and burglary, may not be a poster child for reform. But he was held accountable with prison time for his offenses, and his criminal record shouldn’t disqualify him from constitutional protections—if anything, people like him should be proof that basic rights belong to everyone. And his determined efforts to hold officers accountable for assaulting him are making a difference. Thanks to him, the Mesa Police Department is training officers to avoid injuring arrestees.
This is some progress for a police force that’s needed it for years. Just three years ago, the City of Mesa paid out a record-setting $8 million settlement to Daniel Shaver’s widow. Mr. Shaver was shot and killed by a police officer while he was lying on the ground, unarmed, and held at gunpoint. The officer in that case was tried for murder. Another lawsuit ended with a settlement from the city after a man accused Officer Pew—the same officer who tried to choke out Mr. Spencer—of unlawfully shooting him with a beanbag.
But all of this accountability came from lawsuits: Mr. Shaver’s widow complained of a “blatant lack of accountability by all involved” in her husband’s death, and internal investigations did not sustain either complaint against Officer Pew. Despite the settlement paid out to Mr. Spencer, Officer Pew has been promoted to sergeant.
Mr. Spencer’s case exposed failures at every level: coercive plea bargaining that nearly buried his beating, qualified immunity that nearly blocked his lawsuit, and police administrators who cleared Officer Pew yet again. No victim of official wrongdoing should have to overcome so many obstacles to get justice.
Not all of these problems are within the City of Mesa’s control: plea bargaining is up to the County Attorney, and qualified immunity is a matter for the federal courts. But as 2026 begins, and as concerns about excessive force dominate the headlines, the city has choices to make. It can continue to defend indefensible conduct, pay millions of dollars in settlements with taxpayer money, and promote officers with troubling track records. Or it can reform from within—requiring body cameras to be turned on at the outset of all arrests and replacing the internal investigation process that has failed to sustain complaints even when courts and juries found misconduct.
Mesa should make such an overhaul—before the next lawsuit forces its hand.
