Nine San Francisco cops tackled an unarmed black teenager to the ground after caught allegedly jaywalking on the sidewalk.
A video of the aggressive use of police force shows the 16-year-old being forced to the ground shortly after an altercation with an officer who accused him of walking in a bus-only lane.
The Guardian reports:
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The incident happened in the city of Stockton, 80 miles (130km) east of San Francisco, on Wednesday morning. A cellphone video uploaded to Facebook and YouTube by a passerby has been viewed more than 10,000 times.
It shows an officer using his baton to push and hold the boy, wearing shorts, on a landscaped perimeter on the sidewalk.
They scuffle, the boy yelling “get the fuck off me” and the officer shouting “stop resisting arrest”. The officer strikes him in the face and orders him to the ground but the boy does not comply.
An unseen female bystander shouts in protest: “That’s a fucking kid! Don’t touch him, leave him alone! That’s a kid. Are you serious? He didn’t do nothing wrong.”
The officer retrieves from the ground what appears to be a body camera knocked off during the scuffle.
Several patrol cars arrive and four officers force the boy to the ground, handcuff him and march him to a car while colleagues mill around them. The protester’s voice rises in anger and disbelief: “That is a child! That is child that was jaywalking! That’s a fucking child! What’s wrong with y’all?”
Sean Adl-Tabatabai
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