Two Phoenix police officers arrested and fired after violent, unreported traffic stop

Phoenix Police Disband Unit After Officers Detained Over Unrecorded Traffic Stop That Left Two People Injured

Earthguardiansonline.com – A late-night traffic stop in Phoenix on August 5 ended in what the department now characterizes as aggravated assault and kidnapping — crimes allegedly committed by two of its own officers who never filed a report and never switched on their body cameras. The encounter left a male driver and a female passenger physically beaten and Tasered. The incident only surfaced days later when a Tempe patrolman stumbled onto an abandoned sedan and traced its occupants through a chain of phone calls that ultimately led back to the Phoenix precinct.

Charges, terminations, and current custody status

Officers Antonio Felix and Luis Vasquez were taken into custody on charges that include aggravated assault and kidnapping, Phoenix Police Chief Matt Giordano announced at a Saturday news conference. Both men were simultaneously terminated from the department. By Sunday, Vasquez had been released from custody while Felix remained held at the Lower Buckeye Jail in Phoenix, according to Dave Evans, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Efforts to reach either officer’s defense attorney for comment were unsuccessful. A court date has been set for Friday.

What the victims described

The two people involved — a man behind the wheel and a woman in the passenger seat — recounted a chaotic confrontation in which the officers shattered the vehicle’s window. Vasquez struck the male driver and threatened to fire his weapon at him, while the woman was pulled from the car and placed in handcuffs. The man eventually managed to drive away and left the vehicle parked in neighboring Tempe. The woman was released at the scene.

Both later told a responding officer that they had been shocked with a Taser. The male driver added that he had been punched in the face multiple times and that he and his passenger had repeatedly asked why they were being stopped. The Tempe officer who took their statements wrote in his report that he believed the pair were victims of an attempted carjacking carried out by individuals impersonating police.

How the case came to light

The Tempe patrol officer who responded to the abandoned car radioed dispatch to ask whether any nearby agency had logged a fleeing vehicle. The answer was no. He then called the car’s registered owner — the male driver’s mother — who connected him to the woman passenger and, ultimately, to the driver himself. That single phone call set off the chain of events that led Phoenix detectives back to two of their own officers.

Chief Giordano’s reaction and the investigation

Giordano said his initial reaction was one of disbelief, describing the incident as

“so far outside the want of our policies.”

Once detectives began examining the details, they realized Phoenix officers might be involved and shifted the matter to a special investigations detail. From that point, investigators assembled physical and digital evidence piece by piece.

“Detectives have confirmed that the two former officers physically assaulted both the man and woman during the traffic stop,” Giordano said. “The investigation also shows that a Taser was used on the victims during the stop.”

The officers never filed a report for the August 5 stop and did not activate their body-worn cameras. Giordano acknowledged the absence of video but said investigators had assembled what he called probable cause.

“There is no video evidence, but we established what we believe is probable cause that these crimes were committed,” Giordano said.

He added there was no indication the officers had prior knowledge of the victims. Giordano pointed to the city’s automatic vehicle locator system, which placed a department vehicle near the scene at roughly the time the victims said the encounter occurred.

Background on the officers and department context

Felix had served nine years with Phoenix police; Vasquez had eight. Giordano noted, without further elaboration, that both had previously violated department policy but characterized those earlier infractions as “nothing of this nature.” The Phoenix department’s internal investigation and audit remain ongoing.

Phoenix Police Department operates one of the largest municipal forces in the Southwest, patrolling a metro area of roughly 1.7 million residents across Maricopa County. Body-worn cameras have become standard issue across most large U.S. departments following a series of high-profile incidents in the early 2010s, and their failure to activate — or the failure to file a dispatch report — routinely becomes a central question in civilian complaints. Traffic stops account for a significant share of officer-citizen contacts nationwide, and departments typically require that every stop be logged in a computer-aided dispatch system and recorded on camera. When those safeguards are bypassed, accountability depends on witness testimony, dispatch logs, and vehicle-tracking data — precisely the tools investigators relied on in this case. The absence of a report and the absence of footage together raised the stakes of the investigation, because without them the department had to reconstruct the sequence of events from third-party accounts, the Tempe officer’s report, and the automatic locator ping that placed a city vehicle at the scene at the relevant time.

The case also underscores a broader accountability question that has followed American policing since the mid-2010s: what happens when the people sworn to enforce the law are themselves the subjects of a criminal investigation? Phoenix’s decision to move the matter to a special investigations detail, to terminate both officers before trial, and to publicly acknowledge the lack of video evidence represents an attempt to answer that question with transparency rather than institutional silence. Whether the Friday court date produces a conviction, a plea, or a dismissal will determine how the department’s narrative — and the victims’ experience — is ultimately resolved.