Social media anger exploded after footage was released of a female Arizona police officer putting a 15-year-old girl in a chokehold, as the teenager shouted that she was unable to breathe and her mother was begging to stop.
The cell phone footage emerged on Friday and was posted on
Facebook. It has since gone viral and
received more than 2.5 million views.
The punching incident took place in Mesa, Arizona, on Friday. A
witness caught it on video and the cameraman can be heard
pointing out, “he just punched her in the face”. “I
can’t breathe, I can’t breathe…please…” the girl is
screaming.
A bystander approaches, apparently to intervene in the situation,
who was later discovered to be the victim’s mother; the girl had
apparently been an “emotionally unstable” runaway, according to
Luis Paul Santiago, who recorded the incident.
According to the
Free Thought Project, the second police officer standing
nearby said that his colleague’s actions were in accordance with
the procedure and that if she’d wanted, the officer “could
have shot her dead.”
Santiago can be heard towards the end of the recording telling
both the family of the girl and the police officer that he had
filmed the entire thing.
“The cops wanted to delete this off my phone,” he later
wrote in a Facebook post accompanying the video.
The mother reportedly said the girl suffered from asthma so the
chokehold could have been potentially fatal.
“It’s a shame this happens to teenagers who can't even defend
themselves,” one commenter wrote.
“That's bulls***,” another began. “He needs to be
charged for NOT protecting or serving the public and making our
streets safe, why fear gangs or criminals when our cops are just
as bad…”
This incident has come on the backdrop of nationwide protests
against police violence, sparked by the deaths of Eric Garner and
Michael Brown at the hands of police officers, who were later
acquitted of any wrongdoing by a grand jury in both cases.