We’ve had interesting threads related to this subject before. Here is a video of a 15 year old girl getting arrested and pepper sprayed while being arrested.
What the hell is a teenager getting arrested for, for violating a stupid curfew? Where I grew up if you were driving and under the age of 18 after 11PM you could get cited, but arrested?
As far as the pepper spray goes, it was probably overkill, but I really don’t fault the officer because the girl had been resisting the whole time and then too the next step in actually attacking the officer. Pepper spray was used to subdue/distract her with pain while he safely restrained her.
Well, the issue of whether it was appropriate for him to arrest her is a separate point.
He tried to cuff her while she’s struggling and screaming that he’s hurting her arm and that she’s not doing anything. Then she bit him, then he pepper sprayed her, then he was able to cuff her easily. Pepper spray wasn’t an escalation of the violence, it de-escalated the violence.
I see no problems with his actions. He strikes me as calm and professional, just being momentarily (and understandably) upset when she bites him. The pepper spray wasn’t overkill in the least, if the alternative was punching her lights out, a choke hold or smacking her with a nightstick.
As for why she’s being arrested, I’ll wait for details before deciding to jump to her defense. Based solely on this video, my support is squarely with him.
The girl in the video reminds me of my niece who’s completely spoiled and has never been successfully disciplined in her entire life without wheeling and dealing and crying her way out of it.
You know, in the Army they used to gas all of us at least once so we knew what it was like.
Yah, I was reminded of the video of the Floridian girl on the phone in a car who got tazed by the officer when she refused to cooperate. In that video I applauded the officer who tazed the bitch.
In this video it was different. I don’t fault the officer at all, but I was slightly sympathetic to the girl who was obviously scared and apologetic, and did something stupid out of fear (IMHO). Yah, I agree, it probably stems from no real discipline in her life, but this is a hard way to hit the wall. Even though it’s probably the best thing for her in the long run.
Ha! I did my gas-hut refresher just last weekend, for the 11th or 12th time. It’s un-fun, especially when you’re wearing a mask and an NBCW suit and some sergeant is telling you to run in place for two minutes, but I recovered.
But how can you scream “I’m not doing anything! I’m sorry! I’m not doing anything!” but still struggle when the cop tries to cuff you. You ARE doing something. You’re struggling and biting.
Stupid bitch gets what she deserves. Film at eleven.
I bet if I bit a cop and struggled against an arrest attempt, I’d be damned lucky to only get peppersprayed. She most likely got away with a lot more than a male in a similar situation would have.
I saw a guy get cuffed and escorted out of the my store just last week. He wasn’t happy and he said he hadn’t done anything wrong but he was smart enough to cooperate and put his hands behind him and they cuffed him and walked him outside without an ugly confrontation.
I know it must be shocking to suddenly realize you’re going to be cuffed and arrested but I can’t quite understand the people who think that struggling crying and screaming will someone make it work out better. I doubt the penalty for violating curfew is too severe. Go downtown and wait while they call your parents or something like that. I wonder how the officer explained what was going to happen? OTOH what’s an officer supposed to when someone gets totally irrational and emotional. He tries several times to tell her to stop struggling and cooperate. She could continue to apologize and plead innocence while cooperating like the guy in my store did, but instead she kept struggling and then assaults the officer. It’s a harsh lesson but life is like that sometime.
I wondered how I would feel if that were my daughter. I’d feel pretty bad and protective but I wouldn’t fault the officer. In this case the kid let her emotions get the better of her and made some bad decisions.
The idea of a grown man (cop or not) punching a child in the face is appalling and it illustrates, at least to me, that real reforms in law enforcement need to take place. The idea that this cop expects us to entertain the notion that this gaunt-looking girl attempted to extract a “large piece of flesh” from the officer’s arm is plain ridiculous. Now only did he hit her right in the face (cleverly ignored by the posters here) causing her head to bang against the the dashboard but then he pepper sprayed her. She was already stunned from the blow.
The officer should have immediately called for an experienced female officer to handle the situation. Period. He clearly had no idea what he was doing.
I’m not an expert on police procedure, but I don’t see anything wrong with what that cop did. It looks to me like he tried to reason with her and finally subdued her using a minimal amount of force given her resistance and apparent attempt to bite him.
If my daughter were ever arrested and tried to resist, I would hope that the cops would be that gentle with her.
No need to be snippity, thanks for pointing that out, I actually missed the punch you were talking about the first time I viewed the video. To me it was a simple reflex to getting bitten. It was done by his free arm instinctually, to which the next logical move would be to try to find another way to subdue her. So next comes the pepper spray. She was momentarily dazed (only moments), because she then begins to struggle again against the officer.
While I agree with you that I would have hoped the officer, probably being over twice her size, should be able to contain her more professionally I’d disagreee with one of your descriptions. You say she is “gaunt-looking”. I say she’s wirey and squirmy. Maybe easy to hold down or pin, but he’s having difficulty putting handcuffs on her, which is more understandable.
Once again, if she wasn’t resisting but still breaking the law I would think that the handcuffs and arrest are really overkill. But she shot herself in the foot on this one, and hopefully will learn a lesson from it.
There are many topics which could potentially be discussed and railed against – such as the militarization of the police force or the increasing regularity of using “less than lethal” instruments like tasers as a means of control – but it’s difficult when the targets are so deserving of having violence rained down upon them.
Maybe you should try some of that Honesty you sign your posts with. He did not “punch” her in the face, by any definition of punch I’ve ever heard of. She bit, he jerked his hand out of her teeth and made an underhanded (ie. very weak) arc of less than 12 inches back to her mouth. She put her head down on the front of the car in response, and then started struggling again while he got out his pepper spray. By the time he sprayed her, she was resisting again.
There was no mark on her face as a result of his “punch”; he didn’t break the skin. I’ve hit myself harder than that chopping firewood. Frankly, I think it’d do people more good to be hit once in a while, to understand that it doesn’t hurt all that much, even if it looks brutal. Since the only punches most of us see are Hollywood special effects bloodpack laden brawls which would kill a person in real life, I think we think getting punched is a lot worse than it is.
She’s about the same size as my 15 year old goddaughter, who is prone to violent outbursts due to her barely controlled diabetes (and behavioral problems). Her stepfather, trained in aikido, will lead her into falls when she’s being violent - using her own body weight and momentum to safely drop her to the ground without hurting her or himself. I’ve seen him go more than 20 minutes at this, with no sign of her tiring or her rage slacking. (At which point, someone else steps in, because he’s exhausted.) I don’t think the same level of time and energy should be expected from a police officer. What exactly would you have had him do, bearing in mind that he was there alone and has more important things to do with his evening?
He did exactly as much as he needed to do to get her safely contained, no more and no less.
