AUSTIN (KXAN) — In a video that had more than 140,000 views at last check, you can hear the screams that one man says made him start recording.
“It was the noises that we heard from behind that made us turn around,” Patrick King told KXAN.
Patrick was visiting from Seguin when it happened in downtown Austin: an arrest he described in a Facebook post as “police brutality.” According to an affidavit, police arrested Justin Joseph Grant, 23, on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, methamphetamine. According to an affidavit, he was carrying a knife at the time and appeared to be drunk.
King says he shot the video around 1:30 in the morning on the Fourth of July. The video has people talking. Less than a minute long, it shows two Austin police officers holding Grant down on the ground. Then, one officer begins punching his head, yelling at a distraught women screaming, “Stop it!” to back up.
The officer then can be heard yelling, “Back the f–k up or you’re going to go to jail.”
Watch the full video below. Warning: some may find it disturbing
In the course of the video, the woman pushes the officer a couple of times before backing up. The video ends with her approaching officers again, saying, “Why are you doing that?” and one of them tells her to put her hands behind her back.
“My reason for recording wasn’t to, ‘Hey, let’s get all cops because all cops are bad.’ It was, ‘You never know what could happen. So it should be recorded just in case it’s needed,'” King said. “This was more of an awareness that this could literally happen anywhere, at any time, at any moment, when you least expect it.”
The recording, along with Chief Brian Manley’s response posted to Twitter, is getting a lot of feedback. Manley wrote, “Thank you for bringing this video to our attention and allowing us time to look into the incident. As is standard protocol, the officers’ chain of command is reviewing all details surrounding this incident.”
“Whatever this man had done, whether it wasn’t bad or it was bad, I don’t feel like there was a need for the officers to continue to yell at him and tell him to stop resisting and turn over when they’re on top of him and punching him and hitting him,” King said. “You literally cannot move if someone is on top of you.”
The Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday agrees that it looks bad but there’s more to it. “I’ll tell you, as the union president, it looks bad,” he said.
Casaday explained officers were responding to a call from the nightclub Rain, on 4th Street, saying a man was intoxicated and had a large knife. An affidavit says the original call said he was threatening staff with it. The person who worked at Rain told police he didn’t let Grant in “due to his high level of intoxication.” Casaday said police also tasered the man, prior to the recorded video.
“When he was on the ground, you can see the officers punching, which they freely admit to. What you can’t see is the subject grabbing for a 6-inch knife that he had on his waistband, that the officers not only saw, but were told that was there by people from the nightclub,” Casaday said.
According to the affidavit, multiple people warned the police officers of the knife on Grant’s waist before they approached him while he was in “another disturbance” with a woman nearby.
Officers reported in the affidavit that Grant resisted being handcuffed. They wrestled him to the ground. “Grant rolled onto his stomach, further preventing us from handcuffing him behind his back and also continued to keep his arms tensed up,” according to the affidavit. “Grant then began to attempt to pull his arms downwards towards his waistband, which seemed to me that he was making an attempt to grab his knife.”
A separate affidavit for Alexandria Green, 23, the woman seen yelling at officers in the video, says she grabbed ahold of one of the officer’s body armor and pulled him off Grant. In all, she tried to push them off Grant three times before bar staff restrained her. After Grant was handcuffed, officers also handcuffed her after a struggle.
Green was arrested on a charge of interfering with public duties, which is a Class B misdemeanor.
Officers found the 6-inch knife with a black handle and silver blade inside a sheath clipped to the front of his waistband after they handcuffed him, the affidavit said.
The union president added, the situation could have been worse.
“Use of force is not pretty,” he said. “Knowing the facts, I’m just glad that’s all the force they had to use. When you have the knife involved, the failure to put the hands behind the back and trying to grab for the knife, this very easily could have ended up in a deadly force situation. And I’m thankful that they just had to use their taser and punch him a couple of times.”
An investigation will have to determine whether that use of force was appropriate.
Casaday said the incident doesn’t surprise him. “Every day, you have bad encounters in law enforcement with people that are intoxicated on alcohol,” said Casaday.
Records show Grant has an extensive arrest record in Williamson County. In 2014, he was charged with resisting arrest by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office.
