WORCESTER — The city recently paid $20,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a Liberian immigrant who alleged he was racially profiled and falsely arrested by an off-duty detail police officer at Walmart.
Prosecutors dropped charges against the man after he argued surveillance video showed the officer lied, and the city’s police chief found the officer engaged in false arrest.
The officer, Joseph Mitchell, was cleared of racial profiling and excessive force. The department declined to provide Mitchell’s assignment or offer comment on the case.
The man who filed the lawsuit, Ambrose Toekulah, was charged in 2019 with resisting arrest, disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct after Mitchell stopped him on suspicion of shoplifting.
While Walmart, which was also named in the lawsuit, determined nothing had been stolen, Mitchell arrested Toekulah, writing in his report that the man acted disorderly, disturbed the peace and initially refused to provide him with his receipts.
Toekulah’s lawyer argued in a September 2019 court motion that surveillance video of the incident provided by Walmart proved Mitchell lied, and the district attorney’s office dropped the charges a month later.
“(Prosecutors) recognized what happened here, and they wanted no part of it,” the man’s lawyer, James P. McKenna, told the Telegram & Gazette last year.
City lawyers representing Mitchell settled the case in November, records the newspaper obtained show, with a gag order restricting McKenna or Toekulah from commenting.
Toekulah and McKenna spoke to the T&G at length last April, seven months before the agreement was signed, telling a reporter they believed Toekulah was targeted because of his race.
“Shopping while African should not be an arrestable offense,” McKenna, who teaches ethics and Constitutional law at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said at the time.
Police Officer Joseph Mitchell, center, holds an item or items in his hands at Walmart prior to arresting Ambrose Toekulah in November 2019. Toekulah argued in a settled lawsuit that, contrary to what Mitchell wrote in his police report, he gave the officer both his receipts upon request.
A disputed arrest
Toekulah, a husband and father in his late 30s who immigrated to Worcester about a decade ago, was arrested at Walmart’s 25 Tobias Boland Way location around 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2019.
The man, who has served in leadership roles in multiple local Liberian organizations, alleged Mitchell profiled him and then lied about the interaction to support the arrest.
