A police department in Oklahoma has released details regarding a forceful arrest that was caught on cellphone video, showing an officer repeatedly punching a Black man on the ground.
The nearly minute-long clip, which went viral on social media, shows a police officer in Henryetta, Oklahoma, repeatedly punching a man as he’s on the ground, crying for help.
The cop and the man he’s detaining appear to be in a parking lot of a Casey’s General Store with a police vehicle behind them.
The officer is seen sitting on top of the man and restraining him while punching his head multiple times. The man being detained is heard questioning the cop and calling for help.
“What are you doing, bro?! No! Somebody help me!” the man cries out.
Onlookers hear the man’s pleas and run over to the scene, where they surround the cop. A couple of bystanders are seen taking out their cellphones to record the incident.
“I didn’t do anything!” the man on the ground yells.
It appears the video of the scene was initially posted on Feb. 9 before being reposted to different platforms.
Shortly after the clip went viral, the Henryetta Police Department released bodycam footage to KOTV showing what unfolded before the cop’s takedown.
The agency identified the man being restrained as Ramone Hester, a domestic violence suspect who had a warrant out for allegedly punching his girlfriend. Authorities say they had been looking for Hester for weeks.
In the bodycam video, an officer is seen approaching Hester in a gas station parking lot to detain him and confirm the warrant, but Hester immediately refuses.
The body camera falls off the cop as the officer wrestles Hester to the ground. Bystanders start to surround the struggle after Hester calls for help, and they’re heard criticizing the cop’s actions.
According to Police Chief Steve Norman, some of those witnesses, as well as viewers of the viral clip, only saw a brief portion of the detainment, which seems incriminating on the surface, but he underscored the need for context.
“As things move this way, where you only see a certain portion of a video that appears to paint the officer in a negative light but never really have any intentions of watching the entire video for the whole context of the situation or the background of the person you’re dealing with, it’s shallow,” Norman told KOTV. “All these folks that watched this video, they are all theorists. We are the practitioners of this. And if you’ve never been there, never been in that situation, you don’t know what he’s going through.”
The chief added that his officers were trained to use their forearms in maneuvers to take down suspects.
“The officer had actually gotten injured when they went to the ground. Since the arrested would not comply, still would not give his hands up, and fearing the fact he may have a weapon, we don’t know, he began to strike him and try to get him to comply,” Norman said.
Norman said his officers have had multiple encounters with Hester in the past and claimed that Hester had shown “hostility” in those previous run-ins.
Court documents show that Hester had previous convictions in Oklahoma and Kansas for drug-related offenses, possessing stolen property, and stalking.
The town of Henryetta is located in central western Oklahoma, roughly 50 miles south of Tulsa.
