"You a dumb
bitch," video captures cop saying after yanking victim from car.
by David Kravets –
A 36-year-old Baltimore woman claims she was
tased by police and arrested while filming the arrest of a man with her mobile
phone, according to a lawsuit to be served on the Baltimore City Police
Department as early as Thursday.
Video of the March 30 melee surfaced online this
week. Police erased the 135-second recording from the woman's phone, but it was
recovered from her cloud account, according to the Circuit Court for Baltimore
City lawsuit (PDF), which seeks $7 million.
Kianga Mwamba was driving home from a family
gathering in March. Stopped in traffic, she began filming the nearby arrest of
a man who she says was kicked by police.
"You telling me I can't record," the
woman says on the video as police tell her to move on.
"I'll park. I'll park. I'll park," the
woman is heard saying in her own recording.
All of a sudden an officer says, "Out of the
car. Out of the car."
She was yanked out. "He burning me. He
burning me," the woman is heard screaming.
The lawsuit comes as at least one state,
Illinois, moves to ban the recording of the police amid calls across the nation
for cops to be equipped with body cameras to help prevent future police
scuffles resulting in deaths. President Barack Obama has also weighed in on the
issue, announcing last week that the administration would provide $75 million
in funding to police departments to purchase body cameras. Even before Obama's
announcement, local police departments were gobbling them up as fast as they
could in the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri death of Michael Brown.
Mwamba was arrested on charges of assault for
allegedly trying to run over two officers. Charges were dropped, and she
suffered cuts and bruises.
At the end of the tape, an officer says,
"You a dumb bitch, you know that?"
"What did I do?" she asks.
"You just tried to run over an
officer," the officer responds.
While in custody, she gave her phone to an
officer to show the video that she didn't try to run over anybody. The video
was allegedly erased from the phone in what her attorney, Joshua Insley,
described in a telephone interview as a "coverup."
The police department said in a statement that
the language the officer used was "both offensive and unacceptable."
"The video does not capture enough
information to draw definitive conclusions about what transpired before,
during, and after the arrest," the department said. "What is clear is
that the language used is unacceptable and will not be tolerated."
The suit, filed last week, said the police
"attacked" the woman, "dragged" her from her vehicle, and
"threw her onto the street, handcuffed her, tasered her, called her a
'dumb bitch,' and kept her restrained."
The suit says the officers arrested Mwamba and
"threw her face-down on the street" to "prevent the disclosure
of the video taken of them beating a handcuffed man."
That handcuffed man was 27-year-old Cordell Bruce,
who faces assault charges on allegations of striking an officer outside a
nightclub—charges Bruce denies. The video does not capture him being beaten by
police.
