A Baltimore woman has filed a $7 million lawsuit against the Baltimore police officers who arrested and Tasered her while she attempted to record them arresting a Black man in March.
The lack of trust between Blacks and the police have become a hot topic recently. Especially since the video of the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man, by a police officer in New York City, didn’t result in a grand jury indictment. In Baltimore, Md., The Baltimore Sun found that the city had paid $5.7 million in settlements since 2011 in claims made against police.
Kianga Mwamba, 36, was leaving a family gathering early Sunday morning in Baltimore, Md., when she decided to record an arrest she witnessed with the camera on her phone.
Mwamba shot the video from the opposite side of the street from the officers. She claims that they had been kicking the arrested Black man, Cordell Bruce, 27, before she started recording.
When the officers noticed her recording, they began to approach her car and ordered her to move the car out of the street.
“I’m pullin over,” Mwamba says. “How can I pull over right here when the police is right here?”
After that, the video footage is dark, but the audio remains clear.
She then says, “Why would you do that?” and there’s a thud sound on the car. Officers begin to order her out of the car and a struggle begins. At the 1:45 minute mark, the clicking of the Taser is heard.
“Are you serious?” Mwamba asks. “What did I do?”
At the 2:10 minute mark a male voice says, “You’re a dumb b***h, you know that.”
“You just tried to run over an officer,” the same voice said.
Baltimore officer Stephanie Uruchima filed a report claiming that Mwamba accelerated and hit officer Kari Larson in the legs. Mwamba denies trying to hit Larson. Uricihima’s description of extracting Mwamba from the car also doesn’t match the video recording.
Even though she recorded the incident, Mwamba claims the police deleted the video from her phone before she was bailed out of jail the following Monday. Luckily, a copy of the video was saved by another app.
All the charges against Mwamba were dropped in September due to “insufficient evidence to move forward,” according to the Baltimore Sun.
The Police Department, which knew about the video since April, held a “Twitter Town Hall” question-and-answer Monday after the video went public. The department said in a statement that the language was “both offensive and unacceptable,” and that they had begun an “in-depth investigation.”
“The video does not capture enough information to draw definitive conclusions about what transpired before, during and after the arrest,” the statement said.
The state’s attorney’s office will decide if any criminal conduct occurred, the Sun reported.
