Last month, two police officers were captured on video tasing a handcuffed woman as she screamed in pain in downtown Flint, Michigan. But rather than acknowledging possible misconduct in the disturbing footage, or naming the officers who took part in the arrest, as is fairly routine at a time of heightened awareness of police brutality, cops say they did nothing wrong.
In the video, first shared on Facebook by Amanda LaMielle, a 47-year-old educator who happened upon the scene during a night out downtown, a woman is seen standing in handcuffs as two police officers tower over her.
The woman—cops refused to identify her to The Daily Beast, but indicated she was facing charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct—had apparently been restrained by bouncers at a local night spot, LaMielle said.
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“That’s where it begins,” LaMielle told The Daily Beast, explaining she captured the incident on her cell phone around 10:30 p.m. on July 29.
“When you see her feet go up … her body is just a noodle, and so her feet fall back down. She falls down to the ground,” she said, describing cops’ initial attempts to put the other woman in the car.
“They just move in closely and start tasing her, hoping that nobody’s going to notice. But obviously, I did,” LaMielle continued.
In the video, the woman screams as she is tased at close range by two Flint Police Department Officers while sitting on the ground, her arms handcuffed behind her back. Afterwards, the cops attempt to put her in the car once more, and are eventually successful.
According to LaMielle, she heard the unidentified woman get tased a second time while sitting in the car; the footage obtained by The Daily Beast is not clear on that point.
When LaMielle asked the police for their identification, they refused to provide it, as captured on video.
Booth, the police spokesperson, confirmed the unidentified woman was tased twice, though he did not indicate whether she was tased while inside the vehicle.
He also flatly denied any wrongdoing by the officers.
“The officers’ actions are not being investigated,” Booth told The Daily Beast. “We are aware of the video—our agency have reviewed the video and there are no department violations.”
Booth added that “officers are required to identify themselves to the public,” but that in reviewing the video, the department decided they did nothing wrong, and that they were “involved in quite a difficult situation.”
When The Daily Beast asked what, exactly, would keep officers from responding to LaMielle’s question about who they were, he said he didn’t want to “debate.”
“They were quite busy dealing with an arrest,” Booth said.
The spokesperson went on to claim that the arrested woman kicked a cop in the face three times, though it was not caught on the video LaMielle posted to Facebook, and she denied witnessing it in a text message.
When asked by the Daily Beast when, exactly, the alleged assault of an officer happened that night, Booth would not specify: “I think it’s enough for me to tell you why the charges are in place.”
Policing in the downtown sector of Flint has recently ramped up after city commissioners accepted an $850,000 donation from the family foundation of ex-mayor Charles Stewart Mott to fund “Operation Arrowhead.” The proposal called for the deployment of multiple officers from the Sheriff’s department to add onto the local police presence in the city’s downtown after a shooting at a downtown festival in May rattled business owners and the public.
The Genesee County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on the video of the tasing. As of May, homicides were down 27 percent from 2021, according to statistics by the Flint Police Department.
LaMielle said her experience as an activist in other Michigan cities made her wary that incidents like this could lead to something worse in Flint if there continued to be little accountability. Specifically, she pointed to the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya, a Black man, in Grand Rapids.
“Activists spent three and a half years begging and pleading with the commissioners to do something about these rogue police [in Grand Rapids],” she said. “We were laughed at. We were arrested, brutalized. They never did anything. And then Patrick was killed. And that’s just, that’s the direction I see this going. ”
