Attorney Wojciech Kasprzyk represents people harmed by the police and their families. These cases concern the deaths of 29-year-old Łukasza Łągiewki (Wrocław), 25-year-old Dmytra Nikiforenki (Wrocław), 34-year-old Bartosza Sokołowskiego (Lubin), 27-year-old Karola Dąbrowskiego (Gdynia), 42-year-old Rafała Lorka (Gdańsk), 32-year-old Krzystof Lewandowskiego (Płock), and 47-year-old Cypriana Pindaka (Świdnica), as well as the brutal treatment by police officers of Ireneusza Merunowicza from Chojnów.
“This is a cancer that will consume the police,” attorney Wojciech Kasprzyk told the committee. “Everything is done superficially, and we, as the families of victims, have the impression that it is being done deliberately so that the matter is not explained and is made more difficult. But why? I would like to emphasize: we are not demanding that police officers be harmed. But the elements that are bad must be removed. That is how it is everywhere. This is not being done. This is an illness that will lead to people having not a shred of trust in the police,” the lawyer added.
“If you watched recordings from police cameras, you would be astonished,” Wojciech Kasprzyk told the committee. “How ineptly the police conduct interventions. How they do not know how to cope, how they are afraid of one another. They do not know how to act; they do not know how to bend a person’s arm to restrain them safely. I am not talking here about drug addicts or people under the influence of alcohol. They cannot restrain ordinary citizens. The prosecutor’s office knows this, the police know it perfectly well; it is a shame they do not speak about it. Something must be done about police training. It is truly terrifying,” the lawyer said.
Another issue raised by Wojciech Kasprzyk concerned the police’s access to sensitive citizens’ data.
“During the proceedings, we learned—and the national, regional and district prosecutor’s offices know this—that police officers who have access to our personal and classified data use cards that do not belong to them,” attorney Kasprzyk warned. “Every police officer has what is known as a KSIP card (the National Police Information System—editor’s note), assigned to that officer. The card has a generated PIN code, like an ATM card, and the Chief Commander of Police authorizes it. All this is intended to protect our privacy. Yet police officers have been passing their KSIP cards to one another, and other officers used those cards to make entries and view personal data. It may reach a point where, if the prosecutor’s office grants permission and the commander agrees, an officer from Legnica or an officer from Lubin—the latter is whom I am referring to, because I know this from the case files—passes their card to an officer from Rzeszów, who can retrieve all the information. And we will not know who did it: information that is classified, confidential and private. This is a serious allegation on our part, and I am surprised that no action was taken against the officers who did this. It is in the files of a case that was dismissed by the prosecutor’s office,” Kasprzyk told committee members.
The attorney also told the committee about unethical conduct by police officers. In the case of 29-year-old Łukasz Łągiewka (Wrocław), an officer who took part in the intervention later contacted the deceased man’s sister privately. “A family in mourning, and the police officer who beats the young man invites his sister on a date. And he even received a promotion. Another matter: the head of the county police force in Lubin. What does she write on Facebook under the Sokołowskis’ intervention? She writes under her own name that she will give those police officers awards because they are the best police officers in the world,” attorney Kasprzyk said.
Let us recall that in December 2022, the Legnica prosecutor’s office discontinued the investigation into the unintentional causing of Łukasz Łągiewka’s death. The 29-year-old died in early August 2021 following a police intervention in Wrocław. Prosecutor Ewa Szatkowska said the investigation was discontinued because of the “absence of the elements of a prohibited act.”
In the case of the death of 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen Dmytro Nikiforenko at the Wrocław Center for Assistance to Intoxicated Persons in July 2021, four former police officers, two paramedics, an attendant at the sobering-up station, a doctor and the facility’s shift manager went on trial.
The investigation by the Łódź prosecutor’s office into the death of Bartosz Sokołowski, which occurred after a police intervention in Lubin in August 2021, is still ongoing.