The Arkansas State Police have announced they are opening an investigation into the excessive use of force by three officers against a person arrested this Sunday after being involved in an incident at a grocery store (a scenario similar to the arrest and killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020). Video recording the beating immediately went viral on social media, and late Sunday authorities intervened, dismissing the three agents and ordering an investigation.
While two officers beat him – including hitting the victim’s head several times on the pavement – and the third helped immobilize him, the detainee, a 27-year-old man, did his best to avoid the blows. He had been arrested minutes earlier on charges of second-degree assault and unspecified terrorist threats at the store he had just visited, threatened an employee and fled a few meters on a bicycle before police caught him caught up . After the beating, the umpteenth example of police brutality in recent years, the young man, who also fought back against the authorities, was taken to the hospital and later jailed.
The event took place in the town of Mulberry and was captured by a local journalist using his mobile phone. It was immediately uploaded by a user to the TikTok social network, which removed it from the platform shortly thereafter. But the document’s viralization didn’t stop and became a trend late Sunday. The sequence, in which one of the agents grabs the victim’s head and slams him to the ground, sparked an angry reaction from netizens.
State police investigations will be limited to the use of physical force by police, the department has warned, which will then forward the information to prosecutors if the facts constitute a crime. Instances of police brutality, aimed primarily at African Americans, Latinos and members of other minorities, have multiplied in recent years, with more media coverage than at any time since the 2020 killing of Floyd, which sparked the largest wave of racist protests in the country since the time of Martin Luther King.
Floyd, whose agony was videotaped by a bystander for nearly nine minutes, became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter mobilization that toured the United States and many cities abroad in 2020. The Floyd case, like the murder of fellow African-American Breonna Taylor in her home on an anti-drug registry, has helped expand demands for accountability from security forces and fueled debate about institutional racism.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the important information about current affairs in the region.
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe to