Yet another example, caught on video, of police overreach and arguable brutality has been making the rounds on social media, this time out of Stockton, California. The two-and-a-half-minute video shows a 16-year-old black teen barely struggling as a police officer shoves him and ultimately hits him in the face with a baton. The officer is yelling "stop resisting," and meanwhile a bystander is repeatedly yelling, "That's a child!" Also, there are some expletives. (Audio NSFW)
The video, shot on Tuesday morning, has now made national news, via USA Today and elsewhere.
What makes the video particularly absurd and enraging is that both the bystander and the YouTube poster say the kid was stopped, and ultimately arrested, for jaywalking. And it gets more absurd when eight more cops show up on the scene to take down this unarmed and clearly harmless teenager, whom they lead away in tears.
As of Thursday, the teen's family filed a formal complaint with the department.
NBC Los Angeles reports that shortly before the video began, the officer told the teen to walk on the sidewalk and not in bus-only lane, and somehow the incident escalated. According to the YouTube poster, the teen "was 2 feet away from the sidewalk when the cop stopped him" and the teen was apparently dismissive at first. "The cop was telling him to take a sit but the teen kept walking to his bus but the cop kept grabbing his arm & the kid took off the cops hand off his arm so the cop took out his baton, that's when all this happened."
According to Stockton Police spokesman Officer Joseph Silva, the teen had talked back to the officer and refused to comply with the request to move to the sidewalk, and had cursed at the officer, which led to the escalation. An initial investigation into the incident by the department suggests that the officer acted correctly when the teen went to grab at his baton.
Says Silva, "If everyone would just learn to comply with the lawful orders from police officers and not try to hold or grab any of our weapons, force would never have to be use."
Of course, the video only tells a story of a large adult male cop using what appears to be unnecessary force to arrest a teenager for a frivolous offense. As The Guardian reports, the teen was briefly held and released to his mother pending charges in juvenile court for trespassing and resisting arrest.
The YouTube video has now been viewed over 400,000 times and counting, and the social media response can be summed up thusly.
It took 9 officers to detain a teenager and four of them to tackle him, all for the heinous crime of jaywalking http://t.co/lEDdukFPtV
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) September 18, 2015