‘Appalling’ Video Shows the Police Yanking 1-Year-Old From His Mother’s Arms
A video that shows police officers trying to
remove a woman’s 1-year-old son from her grasp as they arrested her in a Brooklyn food stamp office ignited a fury on social media and prompted calls on Sunday for an explanation from the police.
A Facebook user who uploaded the video said the police had been called on Friday after the woman, identified by the police as Jazmine Headley, 23, sat on the floor of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program office in Boerum Hill because there were no available chairs.
After a verbal dispute with a security guard, someone called the police, according to Nyashia Ferguson, who posted the video.
It begins with Ms. Headley lying on the floor, cradling her son and yelling, “They’re hurting my son! They’re hurting my son!”
A female sergeant and three police officers, two of whom appear to be women, surround Ms. Headley and attempt to pull the child away. Then one officer, her back facing the camera, repeatedly yanks the child in an apparent attempt to separate him from his mother.
After more officers join the fray, the officer who yanked the child waves a yellow stun gun at the outraged crowd of onlookers, which includes several children and people filming with their cellphones.
The encounter was the latest in New York to spark outrage over excessive policing against unarmed civilians, despite the Police Department’s implementation of de-escalation training.
Nearly all of the civilians involved in those incidents have been black or Latino. The training followed the death of an unarmed black man, Eric Garner,
from a police chokehold in 2014 on Staten Island.
The Patrol Guide, the official police manual, states that stun guns should be used in limited circumstances: against people who are physically resisting being taken into custody; people who indicate verbally that they intend to do so; and people who are acting in a manner that could cause injury to themselves or someone else.
The Police Department called Friday’s incident “troubling” in a statement on Sunday, and said officers had responded to a 911 call for harassment. When the officers arrived, security guards told them that Ms. Headley had refused to leave.
The police officers told Ms. Headley to leave “numerous times,” the police said, and after she refused, the security guards “brought the woman to the floor.” Police officers then tried to arrest her; despite her resistance, she was taken into custody, the police said.
Ms. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration and trespassing. The police said she refused medical treatment for herself and her son, who was placed in the care of a relative.
She could not be reached for comment on Sunday because she was being held without bail on Rikers Island, according to online corrections records and Brooklyn Defender Services, the public defender organization representing her.
Deputy Commissioner Phillip Walzak, a police spokesman, said the officers involved are all assigned to the 84th Precinct and remained on full-duty status. He declined to give their names or say whether they followed department protocols, citing its investigation.
The department is investigating the incident with the city Human Resources Administration, which administers public benefits. A spokeswoman for Allied Universal, the parent company of the security firm visible on security guards’ patches, FJC Security, did not respond to requests for comment.
“They’re always rude,” Ms. Ferguson said about the guards in an interview. “They think that people that are poor don’t have nothing, so you can treat them any kind of way.”
She disputed the police account of the incident and said the officer who waved the stun gun, not a security guard, had forced Ms. Headley to the ground.
The police “didn’t help at all,” she said. “They made it way worse.”
For the city’s poor, applying for public assistance requires copious amounts of patience, and Friday had been no different for Ms. Headley, Ms. Ferguson said.
Ms. Headley had been waiting for about two hours, sitting on the floor the entire time, in the part of the office that helps families get child care, Ms. Ferguson said. The office was more crowded than usual, she said, and the wait times were agonizing.
A female security guard eventually approached Ms. Headley, and several more guards followed as a verbal dispute escalated. Ms. Ferguson said they taunted Ms. Headley and laughed in her face before leaving.
Ten minutes later, they returned with the police, Ms. Ferguson said. A fearful expression crossed Ms. Headley’s face as they approached, she said.
The police officers asked Ms. Headley to come with them, Ms. Ferguson said. When she tried to explain, they cut her off. The situation quickly devolved into chaos.
“The baby was screaming for his life,” said Ms. Ferguson, who was there with her 7-month-old daughter. “The lady was begging for them to get off of her. I was scared.”
On social media, some people fumed over the police officers’ actions, and wondered what Ms. Headley could possibly have done to warrant their response.
“This is unacceptable, appalling and heart breaking,” Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker,
wrote on Twitter. “I’d like to understand what transpired and how these officers or the NYPD justifies this. It’s hard to watch this video.”
Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, called in a statement for the officers to be placed on desk duty and the results of the investigation to be made public.
“Being poor is not a crime,” said Ms. James, who is also the state’s attorney general-elect. She added, “No mother should have to experience the trauma and humiliation we all witnessed in this video.”
Alex S. Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who coordinates its Policing and Social Justice Project, said that rather than defusing tensions, the officers appear to be needlessly using force against someone who refused to comply with their requests. He said the officers deserved to be suspended.
“It’s just hard to imagine what possibly could have transpired before the video starts that would have warranted that level of force in those circumstances,” he said.
Professor Vitale added that he was baffled that no one in the food stamp office, which has security guards and social workers, could figure out how to handle the situation without calling the police.
A police officer who
waved a stun gun at teenagers near Midwood High School in Brooklyn in March 2017 is facing disciplinary charges after Professor Vitale recorded the incident. “You want to ride the lightning?” the officer asked one of the teenagers, after pushing her with his baton.
In an era when New York City’s police commissioner has pushed for stronger ties between neighborhoods and the police who patrol them, Professor Vitale said incidents like these only harden mistrust of the police among poor people of color.
“This just reinforces their sense that police are a source of violence and injustice,” he said.
