Pinal County police brutality video could cost taxpayers major sum

The false arrest and thuggish treatment of an 18-year-old high school student by Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller’s chief investigator, Richard “Hank” Mueller, may leave county taxpayers on the hook for close to $1 million to avoid an even more costly lawsuit.

A notice of claim filed with Pinal County on Sept. 16 by attorneys for Rayvion Johnson demands an $800,000 settlement to head off further litigation regarding a March 26 traffic stop that went wrong. Mueller, a disgraced cop, inexplicably body-slammed and roughed up Johnson during the encounter. 

Johnson’s claim is accompanied by a 28-second video shot by a witness to his arrest in Casa Grande. It shows a skinny, 5’4”, 150-pound Johnson standing with his back to a beefy Mueller, his fingers dutifully laced behind his head. To one side is the electronic bike Johnson was riding home from school when Mueller, in an unmarked vehicle, flashed his lights and ordered Johnson to stop, supposedly for running a stop sign.

Johnson, who has no criminal history and had never been arrested before, appears to be shaking with fear when Mueller wraps his arms around Johnson and slams the young man to the ground. Johnson screams for help as Mueller drives his knee into his back. 

As first reported by New Times, Johnson was booked into jail on two misdemeanor counts – lying to a law enforcement officer and “obstructing governmental operations” – as well as one felony count of resisting arrest. Johnson spent a night in jail before he was released on his own recognizance. 

Johnson “presented absolutely no threat to Mueller,” and “no reasonable police officer and certainly no one in the community would believe Mueller’s actions were appropriate or justified,” according to the demand letter, which is a formal prelude to a lawsuit. Mueller’s employer, the Pinal County Attorney’s Office, apparently concurred, declining to prosecute Johnson just days after he was arrested. 

Mueller’s police report belied the stated reason for at least one of the charges. Mueller contended that Johnson “lied” when he supposedly told Mueller he was 17. But Mueller also acknowledged that Johnson gave Mueller his correct date of birth, which is how Mueller knew Johnson turned 18 in January. 

Weirdly, Mueller wrote that his “sense of caution” had been “heightened” by several factors prior to the takedown, including that Johnson was “in a high crime area” and “wearing baggy clothing” and a “hooded sweatshirt.” In other words, Johnson was bicycling while black, heading back to his mom’s modest bungalow after taking a test at the high school he attended.

As a consequence of needlessly tackling Johnson, Mueller claimed he “sustained multiple abrasions” to both of his hands and his right wrist, which seems laughable given the difference in size between the two. 

Johnson, however, came away from the encounter with wounds to his arms, legs and head, as he demonstrated to New Times in April. At the time, Johnson was still frightened by the encounter, which he believed to be the result of “racial discrimination.”

Asked about the role race played in the incident, Benjamin Taylor, one of Johnson’s attorneys, told New Times that he didn’t like to invoke “the race card,” but when it came to Mueller’s checkered law enforcement career, “you could suspect all of the above just by looking at his reputation.”

As New Times has previously reported, Mueller, 44, has a long, sordid history as a law enforcement official that involves being booted from the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office for a drunken bar fight in Tempe and his name landing on the county’s Brady List of discredited cops. His rap sheet for other law enforcement agencies include s joining in a police beat-down of a handicapped man and shooting a suspect fleeing a traffic stop. 

Yet shortly after taking office, Miller hired Mueller as the county attorney’s chief of investigations, supervising an 8-to-10-person unit of investigators, at a starting salary of $93,000 per year.

Why Mueller was in Casa Grande mid-morning on a weekday, parked on the side of the road, stopping an alleged traffic scofflaw remains unexplained.  

‘You did the full George Floyd on him’

The notice of claim is sure to heighten tensions between Mueller’s jefe and the all-GOP Pinal County Board of Supervisors, which has clashed with Miller over various issues since the MAGA-aligned Republican assumed office in 2025.

Supervisor Stephen Miller – no relation to the county attorney – told New Times that he was aware of Johnson’s notice of claim and had seen screen grabs from the video, though not the video itself.

“When [Mueller] is on top of that guy and he’s got his knee in his back, this is not a good visual,” Miller said, adding that the images were part of “the culture that Brad Miller has brought to his office and is promoting.”

Miller said Johnson’s claim against the county “will cost us,” especially since the supervisor believes that the county’s liability insurance may not cover it.

“It’ll be 100 percent out of the general fund,” complained Miller, who seemed to think $800,000 was a low bargaining point for Johnson’s attorneys. 

“I’d have asked for a lot more,” Miller insisted.

Miller’s colleague, Jeffrey McClure, chairman of the Pinal County Board of Supervisors, took a similarly dim view of Mueller’s manhandling of Johnson.

“It’s a bad situation,” McClure said. “It’s a really ugly stain on the county, and it’s going to cost us a lot of money.”

Unlike his fellow supervisor, McClure had seen the video and read Mueller’s police report. The supervisor was not amused by the report’s description of how Mueller “assisted [Johnson] to a prone position” on the asphalt.

“Assisted him to the ground?” McClure scoffed. “You did the full George Floyd on him. For rolling through a stop sign on his electric bike? You have got to be kidding.” 

(The Pinal County Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Johnson’s notice of claim.)

McClure saw the incident as one outcome of the county attorney’s desire to transform his office’s tiny investigations team into an unlikely crime-fighting outfit expanding the unit’s normal function of helping line prosecutors ready cases for trial to duties traditionally handled by established law enforcement agencies – everything from organizing prostitution stings to enforcing municipal traffic codes.

Most notably, Miller unsuccessfully attempted to enter into an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allowing certain cross-trained county attorney investigators to enforce federal immigration law. But the supervisors fought back and won a permanent injunction in state court, which ordered Miller to steer clear of enacting the ICE agreement.

Other controversies have included Brad Miller’s alleged hiring of unapproved employees, a sexual discrimination claim against his office and Miller and his staff’s use of the encrypted Signal app as a means to dodge Arizona’s public records law. Along with the ICE agreement, the disputes over unapproved employees and the Signal use became the basis of a criminal referral from the Pinal supes to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.

According to correspondence obtained by New Times between Mayes’ office and the supervisors, the Attorney General lamely sidestepped the Signal issue, arguing that Miller’s vague criticisms of her on the app created a conflict for her office. 

Mayes also punted on the allegations of improper hirings, but has left open the possibility of an investigation into the county attorney’s ICE agreement once the legal battle between the two sides is finalized.

Pinal County spokesperson James Daniels confirmed to New Times that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is now investigating the Signal issue. An MCSO spokesperson told New Times that the “MCSO currently has an [open] investigation referred to them by the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office [in] reference to the Pinal County Attorney’s Office.”  

The board also recently filed a bar complaint against the county attorney, the contents of which have yet to be made public, though confidential sources tell New Times that the basis of the bar complaint is Miller’s public disparagement of the board, which is Miller’s client – a no-no when it comes to the State Bar of Arizona’s ethical rules.

And in a sign of extreme frustration with Miller, the board tightened up the job description for county attorney investigators in late August, making clear that the position was not meant to broadly enforce local, state, and federal laws, but rather to “work with assigned PCAO attorneys” to prepare “evidence for court proceedings.” 

Among the new “minimum requirements” for an investigator: “May not be on a Brady list or subject to a Brady disclosure.”

But this may not apply to Mueller, as Pinal County officially classifies him as a “law enforcement liaison.” Still, Supervisor Miller made clear the reason for the changes: the county attorney’s claim that the job descriptions didn’t proscribe his investigators from acting like ordinary cops.

“We’ve never had that problem before,” the supervisor explained. “So of course, we didn’t have it written into the job descriptions – because we didn’t think anybody would be so stupid as to do something like that.”