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.
‘EYE FOR AN EYE’: Two of the men were shot by a male relative of the victims, whose families turned down the opportunity to offer them amnesty, the Supreme Court said Four men were yesterday publicly executed in Afghanistan, the Supreme Court said, the highest number of executions to be carried out in one day since the Taliban’s return to power. The executions in three separate provinces brought to 10 the number of men publicly put to death since 2021, according to an Agence France-Presse tally. Public executions were common during the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out publicly in sports stadiums. Two men were shot around six or seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the center
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
The US will help bolster the Philippines’ arsenal and step up joint military exercises, Manila’s defense chief said, as tensions between Washington and China escalate. The longtime US ally is expecting a sustained US$500 million in annual defense funding from Washington through 2029 to boost its military capabilities and deter China’s “aggression” in the region, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said in an interview in Manila on Thursday. “It is a no-brainer for anybody, because of the aggressive behavior of China,” Teodoro said on close military ties with the US under President Donald Trump. “The efforts for deterrence, for joint resilience
RSS