Photo via @Maverick_Queens/Twitter
June 14, 2021, 2:26 pm
Video footage of a young person in Ocean City, Maryland getting hit with a taser after he attempted to take off his backpack as ordered during a stop—apparently for the crime of vaping—has gone viral online.
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Criminal defense lawyer and legal analyst Rebecca Kavanagh, who helped to spread the video on Twitter, says that the victim was a 17-year-old, though a report by Ocean City (which reads like a police report and should be taken with a grain of salt) identifies him as “Brian Everett Anderson, 19.”
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Regardless of age, the report accuses Anderson of trying to “resist arrest,” which is clearly disputed by the video of the incident.
In the video, Anderson is surrounded by several officers who are out of arm’s reach. Anderson stops walking and puts his hands up as ordered, then there seem to be several orders at once, and witnesses say that at least one of them was for him to remove his backpack. As he reaches back toward the bag’s arm straps, quite obviously to comply, he is almost immediately tasered by one of the officers and collapses backward.
Bystanders loudly object to this treatment as an unmoving Anderson is handcuffed, saying in disbelief that they tasered him “for a vape.” The video skips ahead to later show Anderson with at least three cops on top of him while he’s getting hogtied and then being carried away by several officers.
The city’s report on what happened mysteriously omits this tasering of Anderson and fails to explain how or when he was allegedly resisting arrest, only trotting out a long list of charges.
“Officers attempted to place Anderson under arrest for failure to provide necessary identification for the violation of the local ordinance,” the report reads. “Anderson began to resist arrest. Brian Anderson was charged with disorderly conduct, resist/interfere with arrest, assault second degree, and failure to provide proof of identity.”
The report ends by admitting that the city is “aware of the social media videos circulating regarding this incident” but still fails to explain the discrepancies between the report and what we are all able to see with our own eyeballs.
Though U.S. police have a documented habit of lying in their official reports about what happened before and during arrests and/or killing of BIPOC, the discrepancies in this case have many calling for outside investigations into the incident displayed in the video. The NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill called on state Attorney General Brian Frosh to look into this and similar cases of Ocean City police harassing teens of color.
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Others have tagged the city and other officials while demanding answers for the tasing of a teenager over vaping, with more than a few renewing calls to abolish the police or simply expressing their disgust.
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At minimum, fire this cop and charge them for assault. Penalize the others for allowing it to happen. https://t.co/B3EBKxqzzO
— Charlotte Clymer
(@cmclymer) June 14, 2021
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*First Published: June 14, 2021, 2:26 pm
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