June 7, 2015

As if it wasn't bad enough that one officer went completely nuts on kids at a pool party, now we have what seems to me to be a pretty casual pepper spray attack on someone.

The guy in the video looks like he's either taking pictures of police or video, when his phone is snatched out of his hand. As he reaches up to try and grab it back, he's sprayed with a liberal application of pepper spray.

Austin police are investigating a confrontation on Sixth Street between police and what appears to be a crowd of people watching a person being arrested.

The video, going viral on YouTube, shows some people in the crowd filming the arrest with their cell phones Saturday night.

The caption under the video says, “All we saw was someone get tackled by a single police officer (he looked a bit young to be drinking), and then this. Make your own judgement.”

You can see an officer with the Austin police mounted patrol grabbing a man’s cell phone, and then the officer walking behind the horse pepper sprays the man.

The mounted officer then throws the man’s phone to the ground.

According to his Twitter account, the person who posted the video appears to be from California and is in Austin for the X Games.

His name is Tucker and does not want his full name released. He wants this video to get people talking about cameras and police and where body cameras could come in to help.

“For the police officer’s for their own protection. So they feel safe in case the crowd does encroach upon their territory or work. As well as in light of recent events in Baltimore and Ferguson, protecting the citizen who may just be there,” Tucker told KXAN over the phone.

He tweeted several times about the incident:

“I’m not one to call brutality.”

His tweets are in this post at Raw Story.

Tucker’s video shows officers picking a black man — who remains silent throughout the filming and whose crime is unclear — off the ground, and escort him in handcuffs away from a gathering mass of onlookers. Some police are on horseback, and use the horses’ bodies to push back the crowd from the street onto the sidewalk. “Hey, watch the fuck where you going with your fucking horses,” someone can he heard saying in Tucker’s video.

And then, a cop smacks a camera phone from a man’s hand, and pepper sprays him in full view of Tucker’s lens.

“Holy shit, what the fuck, dude?,” exclaims a shocked Tucker. “Holy fuck!”

Reminds me a lot of this:

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