Thirty-six-year-old Kianga Mwamba was in her car using her cell phone to record the arrest of a man across the street when several officers approached her vehicle and told her to stop recording. When Mwamba responded that she’s allowed to record, they asked her to pull her car over, but when she attempted to do so, the officers started screaming at her to get out of the car, then accused her of attempting to run over a police officer. The disturbing video ends with cops Tasering Mwamba while she screams, and one officer telling her, “You’re a dumb bitch, you know that?”
The video is evidence in a lawsuit Mwamba has filed against the Baltimore City Police department seeking $7 million in damages for the treatment, according to Ars Technica. Mwamba says that she was taken into custody after being Tasered, but when she tried to show the video to the officers to prove that she had not in fact tried to hit a police officer, it mysteriously got deleted from her phone. A copy of the video was uploaded to the cloud, however, so her lawyers were able to retrieve it.
According to Ars:
The suit, filed last week, said the police “attacked” the woman, “dragged” her from her vehicle, and “threw her onto the street, handcuffed her, tasered her, called her a ‘dumb bitch,’ and kept her restrained.”
“The video does not capture enough information to draw definitive conclusions about what transpired before, during, and after the arrest,” the police department said in response to the suit. “What is clear is that the language used is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
