Three Bakersfield police officers were caught on video brutalizing a man with their batons and tasering him because he had jaywalked before running from officers in an apparent attempt to keep from being cited Monday evening.
“Stop resisting,” the California cops kept saying as they beat him.
“He’s not resisting,” said the man recording, who sent the footage to his local news station, preferring to remain anonymous.
But police told the media the man was resisting, an action apparently only visible to the trained eyes of police officers.
While a portion of the video is taken from a distance, it’s obvious that whatever the man is doing, he is never a threat to the one officer at the beginning, much less to the three that ended up holding him down, pounding him with batons and shocking him with tasers.
23ABC, who initially broke the story, contacted Sergeant Gary Carruesco at the Bakersfield Police Department, who said the man had a cast on his arm.
He insinuated it was necessary to use maximum force because officers feared for their lives or possible injury from the cast, even though the man was on the ground lying on his back.
In a television interview with 23ABC, Sergeant Carruesco dodged questions asking if Bakersfield cops were within department policy when they decided to use batons and tasers on the man for the crime of jaywalking, and said it would be determined by internal affairs in the future.
“I can tell you by looking at the video there was obvious non-compliance by the person that they were in contact with.”
Carruesco claimed the man had mental issues, but never explained why his subordinates used violent force against a non-violent, mentally ill man.
“It appeared that officers had to use some amount of force to overcome that resisting,” the sergeant shamelessly explained.
But the video doesn’t show the man resisting. The man appears he could be non-compliant about being struck by batons and tasered, attempting to shield himself from being struck again, but it does not show the man physically resisting at all.
When the video begins, one cop is standing over the man on the ground who seems to be only flailing his arms around to avoid being struck, apparently again, by the baton-weilding cop.
The man screams, pleading with the cop that his leg is broken, but it’s not clear if the man is just in pain or if his leg is actually broken.
Even though the cop is standing, he shouts back at the man lying on his back on the ground, posing no physical threat.
“Get on your stomach! Stop resisting!”
A few seconds later, another cop runs into the picture. When that cop got there– the one standing over him came down with the first baton strike.
“He’s not doing nothing,” the man recording the incident observed.
The cops continue shouting the “stop resisting” mantra as one begins pounding his knee into the man’s ribs while another holds him down. A third cop shoots him with a taser when the man kneeing him stands back and swings down on his shins like Jose Conseco.
When a fourth cop creeps onto the scene, the cops appear to have beaten the man in submission, and the one-and-a-half minute video ends.
During Sgt. Carruesco’s interview, which he apparently did on behalf of the offending officers, he said his subordinates are trained to protect themselves from injury and the cops were forced to use the tools they had to in order to ‘overcome’ the man’s resistance.
Despite video evidence that disproves his claims, Sgt. Carruesco stays the course and defends the cops for assaulting the man during the interview.
“The problem with force is that it’s ugly no matter what level it’s at,” Carruesco explained. “Officers are concerned about the safety of the citizens around as well as their own safety.”
However, it never appears to register with Sgt. Carruesco that force may not have been necessary at all. Instead of framing the issue as force versus non-force, the Sergeant told the news station it really came down to the level of force that would justify attacking a man with batons and tasers.
“It just depends on what kind of resistance we’re met with.”
On the same day Carruesco tried to justify the beating, another Bakersfield cop admitted to a federal judge that he and his partner would steal methamphetamine from suspects to later sell it.
Damacio Diaz, who resigned in February after his November arrest, is expected to plead guilty to three felonies this afternoon. At least one more cop, but maybe more, might be named in what the local media is describing as a “growing scandal involving police corruption in Bakersfield.”
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