After more than three years, a deputy sheriff from Los Angeles County pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanors. Prosecutors say he beat a woman during a disturbance call and then lied about it in a report.
A police officer used too much force against Konrad Thieme twice, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in an email that he was given one year of probation and 100 hours of community service last week.
Thieme’s lawyer refused to say anything.
Friday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Thieme has not been on duty since 2021.
In an email statement, the department said, “These actions do not reflect the values of our dedicated staff.” “We remain committed to zero tolerance for criminal misconduct and to upholding the highest standards as we work to ensure the safety and security of our communities.”
This case was finally over more than a year after the county decided to pay $1.75 million to the 32-year-old woman Thieme beat up and shocked with a Taser.
Sarah Jafari, who has a mental disability, was living with her mother at the time of the attack, according to her claim. On the evening of April 10, 2021, Jafari was banging a door against a wall, so her mother called the police.
A summary of the event made by the Sheriff’s Department Risk Management Bureau says that Jafari’s mother said her daughter had a knife and was damaging the house. She was yelling at her mother in the driveway when Thieme got there.
The incident report says Thieme asked Jafari if she had a knife, and she told him she didn’t. The report says Thieme told her to get the police car, but when he reached out to help her, she pushed him away, and he threatened to punch her.
When more officers showed up, one of them shocked her with a Taser. The report says that Jafari then took a “fighting stance” and asked why she was being held. “She refused to comply when Thieme tried to search her,” the summary says. The deputy thought Jafari was “stalling” to get a weapon, so he charged at her.
The cops say that even though Jafari was lying on the ground, she still wouldn’t do what they said.
According to the summary, the officers said Jafari hit them until they shocked her again with a Taser, handcuffed her, and put her in a patrol car while the fight went on.
In a lawsuit she brought in late 2021, Jafari said she was passive the whole time. Video of the event, the lawsuit says, showed that when Thieme first came up to her, she walked backward slowly with her hands out so the cops “could see she was not a threat to them.” Then, the suit says, the deputy punched Jafari in the throat for no reason, which made her fall backward and hit her head.
Thieme is accused of grabbing Jafari by the hair and throwing her in the back of a police car “like a rag doll” after shocking her with a Taser. She was hurt and was taken to the hospital to get better.
The suit says Thieme lied in his report and said that Jafari was resisting arrest. Jafari was jailed because of the deputies’ “fraudulent allegations,” but the charges were dropped and the prosecutors “refused to participate in the frame-up.”
The lawsuit says that after Jafari was arrested, other officers went back to her house and tried to get her mother to lie and say that Jafari had a knife in her clothes before the attack.
In her lawsuit, Jafari says she had a traumatic brain injury that led to seizures that required hospitalization and that she was “extremely traumatized by being attacked by cops.”
An internal criminal inspector from the Sheriff’s Department looked into what happened and found that, despite Thieme’s claims, Jafari did not seem to be in a fighting stance when she asked why she was being held. A review of the case found that she did not seem to be resisting when another officer put handcuffs on her.
The department summary blamed the other deputies for not doing anything when they saw the excessive use of force. It also said that when the officers saw that Jafari was showing signs of mental illness, they should have called the Mental Evaluation Team.
The summary didn’t say anything about whether Thieme had broken any department rules because the administrative review had to wait while Thieme’s criminal case went through the court system.
However records show that in July 2023, the state briefly took away his peace officer certification because he was facing criminal charges and was thought to be dishonest.
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