A woman said she was confronted by police at gunpoint, punched in the mouth and bitten by a police dog after she was mistaken for a much larger bald man suspected of threatening people with a machete.
Tatyana Hargrove’s account is contained in a video posted on Facebook on Monday by the Bakersfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which said that race played a role in the June 18 incident.
As of Tuesday, the video had received nearly 3 million views.
Photo: AP
Police officials ruled that the use of force was appropriate, Police Sergeant Ryan Kroeker told the Bakersfield Californian.
Hargrove, 19, is shown with crutches in the video, and there are close-ups of scratches, bites, bruises and scrapes on her face and body.
Hargrove said she had ridden her bicycle to a local store to buy a Father’s Day gift.
However, it was closed and she decided to return home, she said.
Temperatures in the Central Valley city had hit about 39oC and Hargrove, who had three bottles of water in a backpack, stopped to take a drink.
“And then I turned around and there were three cop cars and one of the officers already had a gun drawn at me,” she said.
The confrontation escalated after an officer demanded to search her backpack and she asked if he had a warrant.
Hargrove said that police grabbed her by the wrist and neck, punched her and threw her to the ground, where she was bitten on one of her legs by a police dog.
One officer put his knee in her back and another knee on her head, she said.
“I told him: ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ and then I started yelling out: ‘Somebody help, somebody help me, they’re gonna kill me,’” she said.
Eventually, she was arrested on suspicion of resisting or delaying an officer and aggravated assault on an officer.
Police said they mistook her for a man who reportedly had threatened people with a machete at a nearby store.
The suspect was described as a 25 to 30-year-old bald man standing about 1.78m tall and weighing about 77kg.
Hargrove is 1.57m and weighs 52kg, the Bakersfield California reported.
Hargrove, who was wearing a hat, “appeared to be a male and matched the description of the suspect that had brandished the machete and was also within the same complex the suspect had fled to,” the arresting officer, Christopher Moore, wrote in a report obtained by the Californian.
He said he thought she had a weapon in her bag.
The confrontation escalated after Hargrove said she was going to leave, the report said.
She was punched in the mouth and bitten after she knocked down an officer and got on top of him, the report said.
She was subdued after fighting the dog and the officers, the report said.
Moore said he did not realize Hargrove was female until she told him her first name.
“I’m a girl. I just don’t dress like one,” she said.
The suspected machete-wielder, Douglas Washington, 24, was arrested the next day.
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