Source: Social media video screenshot.
A police officer’s violent actions in southern California are being investigated after video footage showed the white cop brutalizing an unarmed Black woman for the apparent offense of recording officers detaining her husband.
The incident happened in northern Los Angeles County last month outside of a WinCo grocery store, where the unidentified man was shown on video being handcuffed for the alleged nonviolent offense of stealing a cake, ABC7 News reported.
The video footage recorded by a witness began by showing the woman holding a cell phone and filming officers handcuffing her husband, who can be heard repeatedly asking “why” he was being detained outside of the supermarket in the city of Lancaster.
After two officers struggled to handcuff the husband, one of them walked directly to the wife. When the camera followed the officer, he’s shown grabbing the wife by the back of her neck before violently flinging her to the ground.
The person recording can be heard yelling for the cop to “get off of her” and not to hit her to no avail.
The cop is next shown kneeling on the wife’s neck, evoking horrific imagery from Derek Chavin’s police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
As with the woman’s husband, the officer struggled to place her in handcuffs even though she wasn’t resisting.
Her husband can be heard in the background pleading for the officer to stop. He also said she has cancer. Neither claim prevented the officer from accosting the woman, who was standing at least 20 feet away from the officers when they were handcuffing her husband.
The video is graphic in nature and should be viewed with discretion.
It’s unclear if any arrests were made in the incident.
According to California state law, the woman shown being victimized by the police was not in violation of any statute on the books.
It also appears that the officer who assaulted the woman violated policy by not immediately alerting a supervising officer that someone was recording, as the law states must be done.
Bodycam video footage will be released at a later date, officers said in a statement:
“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has opened an investigation into this incident. While the Department does not make statements related to ongoing investigations, Sheriff Luna has made it clear that he expects Department personnel to treat all members of the public with dignity and respect, and that personnel who do not uphold our training standards will be held accountable,” the statement said. “In the interest of transparency with our community, the Sheriff’s Department is releasing body-worn camera video from the incident.”
This is America.
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