On July 26, at 1:30am, the Dekalb County Sheriff’s Department in Dekalb, Ga. entered the home of a black family, stating that they had an arrest warrant. YouTube user yachtclubclthrs caught the subsequent ordeal on video, starting with officers banging on the front door, shining floodlights into the windows. It ended with the arrest of his mother.
What happened in between is quite troubling. The video has been edited, so the context is hard to discern. Several minutes in, before they’d opened the door to the cops, the mother states, “I do not trust the Dekalb County police. This is retaliation against me for Sgt. James … they broke my fingers last time.” She then adds she’s been involved in a “two-year internal affairs investigation,” though for what is not clear from the video.
Once the door is opened, officers can be heard yelling at the man filming the video, and his brother, while his mother sobs, rebukes Satan, and tells her sons to say the “Lord’s Prayer.” Once she is handcuffed and taken outside, the cops then proceed to brutalize the two brothers, who are also handcuffed.
When asked what the brothers did wrong, one officer responds, “I’mma tase the shit out your ass.”
He claims the ordeal went on for 93 minutes and that even after cops made him turn off his camera, he kept recording, though again, the context and backstory of the evening is not clear. At one point, a cop tells the brothers they “set them back 45 years” by not opening the door when they asked.
He goes on to explain that the police did not have a search warrant:
“Sheriffs illegally searched my entire house and removed items from my mother’s purse which are now missing including $48. The sheriffs also verbally berated myself and my brother calling us ‘big mother fuckers, dumb asses, retarded n*****s,’ and verbally threatened us saying ‘I wish I could cane y’all asses.’”
The video has been making the rounds on Reddit today, urging citizens to take action, but Dekalb County apparently has an equally troubling history of police brutality. The Atlanta Independent Media Center compiled a list of seven incidents that occurred in May 2012 alone, including an investigation into a case involving Sergeant Anthony Robinson, who was fired for “ordering subordinate cops to beat teens while handcuffed.”
The Dekalb County Sherrif’s Office did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
Photo via conner395/Flickr
