A Lansing, Michigan, police officer is on paid administrative leave and police have begun reviewing the violent arrests caught on video, in which officers appear to be striking a man during an arrest Tuesday night.
Officers used taser stun guns and “delivery strikes” during a long feud with the 25-year-old “Combative,” the police official said in a statement Wednesday.
Police Chief Daryl Green ordered an officer, who has not been identified, to put him on leave and said the conduct of all officers involved in the internal affairs investigation would be reviewed.
The incident, which surfaced on the sidewalk at 11:20 p.m., was caught by a bystander who used excessive force.
The video shows five officers pinning the man to the ground, with some people attacking him and giving orders in which the man is stabbed in the stomach. The man says at one point, “Why are you hitting me?”
In the second stage an officer shouts “Give me your hand” and the man says “I didn’t do that.”
Police said in a statement that officers were responding to reports of five to six people fighting and determined the 25-year-old was “the primary suspect in the attack.”
Police said he resisted arrest. “During a long struggle to keep the suspect safe, officers deployed a tease and went on strike,” police said.
When the video begins, at least one officer is seen glowing with the man, who has a hand around the officer’s waist, before more officers arrive and the group goes to the ground.
The man, who claims to have shot the video, Brandon Haddock, 37, said he saw a male officer confronting the man as he walked into a store. The officer told the man to get on the police vehicle and throw a waffle bat in the alley.
He said that when he came out of the store, the male officer and a female officer were “physically attached to the gentleman” before more officers arrived and then he started recording from his car.
“I understand that if someone’s arrest is opposed, you have to subdue it.” “… it doesn’t take much to see the excessive force in the video.”
The 25-year-old was not identified in the police statement, but police said he was assessed at the hospital – which the department says is standard when a taser is used – to be cleaned and taken to a detention center. Formal charges will be sought by the Ingam County prosecutor, police said.
A police spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday night seeking further details.
Two officers sustained minor injuries, police said.
Green, the police chief, “completes the preliminary investigation” and puts an officer on paid administrative leave, but the statement does not say whether Leela made any findings about the conduct.
Lansing Mayor Andy Shore said Wednesday afternoon that the chief is launching an “immediate” review, that the department has released details and an investigation has been launched, according to a report in the Lansing State Journal newspaper.
In the video, at one point the man is arrested, who says, “I can’t breathe,” and the officers immediately get off him, telling him to roll over so he can breathe.
The words echoed the deadly arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, who died after being stabbed in the neck by a police officer, and Eric Garner died in 2014 in the New York City borough of State Island.
