The Daily BuzzPolice footage of teen getting arrested, pepper sprayed sparks online debate
A tense police encounter in the U.S. involving a Maryland teenager escalated into a viral incident after body camera footage was released.
The video released Wednesday shows a 15-year-old girl riding her bicycle Sunday when she collided with a car. Hagerstown police arrived at the scene and after the girl decided she didn’t want to go to the hospital, she got back on her bike to leave the area.
That’s when the situation really began to intensify.
The police officers removed her from her bike, handcuffed her, put her in the back seat of a cruiser and pepper sprayed the teenager.
The video shows the girl wasn’t co-operating and was argumentative. She swore at the police officers and told them not to touch her. She resisted arrest and screamed while she was being detained. She wouldn’t provide her name and she spat when being held on the ground. She wouldn’t keep her feet inside the vehicle when placed in a police car, which led to one of the officers pepper spraying her.
The incident caused a firestorm online. The police officers at the scene were white and the girl was black, which fanned the flames of an already heated debate south of the border.
A writer for the website Boing Boing called it “very sad and infuriating.”
“The police were cold, harsh, and violent with her. They kept aggressively shouting at her ‘Stop!’ and ‘What’s your name!‘” Mark Frauenfelder wrote for Boing Boing. “Imagine your own child suffering a head injury and then being treated like this. Her frightened shrieks are heartwrenching.”
The Daily Beast also covered the story and said: “While the officers had allegedly arrived on the scene to take the girl to the hospital, they began referring to her in criminal terms.”
The reaction from particular media outlets was a sharp contrast to some of the comments left on footage of the incident that was uploaded to YouTube.
“Another video that should be turned into a PSA to show your kids what NOT to do if approached by the police,” one user wrote in a post that appeared as a top comment.
“This is really sad. Do you know all of this could have been avoided if the girl would have just relaxed and not tried to ride away and show just a glimpse of respect?” another person posted on YouTube.
While the police video that made its way online was 14 minutes long, it didn’t contain all of what happened, and of the footage provided, not all of the audio was included. The video doesn’t contain footage of when the police first interacted with the girl at the scene. One of the officer’s body cameras was also kicked off by the girl and the footage picks up from the perspective of another officer arriving at the scene from a different vehicle.
