surfaced Friday amid a swirling controversy about police aggression and the use of cameras to record cops.
James Kelly, a 22-year-old from Hamden, said he made the video at around 1 a.m. on the morning of Friday Sept. 10. The clip he posted on YouTube the next day shows New Haven cops making an arrest in the parking lot at 208 Crown St., next to the Stella Blues bar. Click the play arrow to watch.
The short and shadowy video clip shows a half-dozen cops with nightsticks subduing a person on the ground, then yanking Kelly’s camera away and turning it off.
After viewing the video for the first time Friday, Capt. Bryan Kearney said the police department will be opening an investigation into the incident.
That makes four investigations of police conduct prompted in the last several weeks by cop activity in New Haven’s club district.
Kelly posted his video to the internet on Sept. 11, just over a week before a downtown shootout between clubgoers and police led to a crackdown on the bar district and complaints of police mistreatment in three incidents. The three are now under investigation by the police department’s internal affairs department. In two of these cases—the arrest of a Quinnipiac University student outside Toad’s and a raid on a private Yale party—police have been accused of trying to prevent the use of cell phones to record officer activity.
Videos from those two incidents have surfaced, showing, in one case, officers swearing at the Quinnipiac Student and telling him to stop filming. A video from the raid on Elevate shows police shouting “Who’s next?” and “Anybody else?” after detaining a clubgoer.
Kelly’s Sept. 10 video opens with a scene of several cops grappling with a person on the ground.
“You’re welcome to join him,” a cop tells the cameraman at the start of the clip, referring to the person being detained.
Thirty seconds later, a cop approaches the videographer and grabs the camera.
“I was taking a picture!” the cameraman protests.
“You don’t take pictures of us,” the cop replies. “How do you shut this off?”
“You press the top button. Right there.”
The clip ends.
On Friday, Kelly described his experience while making his video. Here’s what he said happened:
Kelly had gone downtown with some friends from Southern Connecticut State University. Just before 1 a.m., he and his friends stepped out of Stella Blues. He noticed a young guy of maybe 19 or 20 crossing the street. All of a sudden, a cop ran up behind him and grabbed the guy and threw him to the ground. From what Kelly could see, it was entirely unprovoked.
“He wasn’t running or anything,” Kelly said. “They just started beating on him, like, bad.”
“He wasn’t resisting or anything. He went right down,” Kelly said. The police were using Tasers on the guy, who was shouting “What did I do?” Kelly recalled. He said he and his friends were all shocked by the police behavior.
Kelly had just gotten a new phone with a good camera and his friends encouraged him to start filming. He fired up his phone. A police officer immediately told Kelly he could join the guy on the ground. Kelly interpreted that as a threat to his physical safety.
Then another cop forced him to stop filming by grabbing his camera and shutting it off. The police then started pushing bystanders away from the site of the arrest.
Kelly said the cops put their arrestee in a cruiser and took him away. “This kid was a mess. He was bleeding. He was all shaken up,” Kelly said. As for the police, “They just walked away like nothing even happened.”
“I’m just enraged by the whole thing,” Kelly said. “I just felt so bad for that kid.” He said he was upset by the way the cops were treating the guy they arrested. He said he also feels like his rights were violated by police forcing him to stop filming.
On Friday, Capt. Kearney, a patrol commander, responded to the video in an email. He pledged to investigate the conduct on the video and said that police are being trained on the rights of people to videotape police action.
“This is the first time that we have seen the video that you sent us,” Kearney wrote. “I will be investigating the conduct captured in the video and a determination of whether the officer’s conduct was justified will be evaluated and a conclusion will be drawn once the investigation has been completed. The public has a right to videotape an officer’s conduct in public and may do so without interfering with an arrest, scene investigation or causing a safety issue for the officers on scene.
“We are currently conducting training through daily line-ups and in-service training to educate our personnel on the rights of persons who desire to videotape police actions. We are currently researching model policies and developing a training bulletin for officers to ensure that officers understand the legal rights of individuals who desire to videotape police actions,” Kearney continued.
Chief Frank Limon said he had ordered Kearney to look into the incident. “I told him to start an investigation on it.”
The Connecticut ACLU has condemned the alleged prohibition of taking pictures of police. Mayor John DeStefano and police Chief Limon have stated that citizens are allowed to film or take pictures of officers in public.
Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts said on Friday that he was unable to watch the video from his office at City Hall, because of bandwidth restrictions. After hearing the Independent’s description of the clip, he said, “It sounds like that’s something we’d very much want to look into.”
