A Toledo police officer has been permanently removed from a neighborhood and reassigned after a controversial arrest involving a 15-year-old girl was captured on cell phone video.
The Toledo chapter of the NAACP announced the reassignment after meeting with the mayor, police chief, and other city leaders. The officer is still under investigation.
The incident occurred at Lagrange and Austin as the teen, her brother, and two friends walked in the street. Officers stopped the group and began questioning them.
“Basically said so since you don’t want to answer me, he snatched her up. He took, dragged her to his car, laid her mean against the car and then he said she was resisting, but in the video you can see she was not,” a teen said.
“Our interpretation is that it was not necessary… The kids were, they were walking in the street. The officers came along and they immediately got out of the street, respectfully so. And the next thing we know, it just escalated,” adds NAACP Toledo Chapter President Darlene Sweeney-Newbern.
The teen’s mother said her daughter refused to give her name to officers because she believed they had no right to stop the group. The girl called her mother, who rushed to the scene.
“I was on the phone with her. I stayed on the phone with her until I got there,” the mother said.
A cell phone video recorded what happened next. The teen’s mother said she saw an officer grab her daughter.
“He has one of her hands on the back of her, and the other hand is on a police car. I’ve never seen her move. I never see her do nothing and all of a sudden he grabbed her by her hair, yanked her down to the ground,” she said.
Video shows that after officers handcuffed the teen, she allegedly spat on the officer. The officer then appears to slam her back to the ground while she remained in cuffs.
“Point blank, I was there. I saw what he did to my daughter, and it did not warrant nothing that he did to her. He had his knee on my daughter’s neck and as a parent, I had to watch that. And I couldn’t do nothing,” the mother said.
The 15-year-old denied all charges against her in court. She faces charges of harassment with a bodily substance, resisting arrest, and obstruction.
“They ended up just charging her and pretty much throwing anything at the wall that they thought could stick,” said Audrey Sweeny, the teen’s attorney.
Toledo Police released a statement saying that videos circulating online may only show part of the incident and not the full context of the interaction.
Sweeny said the footage that is available is difficult to ignore.
“She’s a child. She’s 15 years old. She was taken down. Excessive force was used on her, and at this point, it’s egregious what happened to her,” Sweeny said.
The attorney said a key legal issue is whether officers even had the right to stop the group in the first place.
“She shouldn’t have been treated like that. Later, we’ll get into if they even had a right to stop her and detain her. It’s going to be something that comes up as well,” Sweeny said.
The teen is scheduled to return to court on May 14.
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