Footage of Arizona police punching and tasering deaf Black man sparks scrutiny

Phoenix police are facing widespread criticism following the release of body camera footage that showed two officers violently tasering and punching a deaf Black man with cerebral palsy.

On Monday, attorneys for 34-year old Tyron McAlpin, who has been charged with resisting arrest and two counts of aggravated assault on a police officer, released body camera footage of McAlpin’s arrest on 19 August outside a Circle K convenience store in Phoenix, Arizona.

According to a police incident report, officers responded to a call about a fight in the store. ABC15 reports that the 911 caller said a white man was causing a disturbance in the store. The police officers, Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue, approached the man who claimed that he was assaulted while trying to stop someone from stealing a bike. The man proceeded to point to McAlpin, who was walking nearby, as the aggressor.

Body camera footage showed the officers approaching McAlpin in a parking lot where they ordered him to lie on the ground. In the police incident report, Harris wrote: “His hands raised to deliver targeted punches at my face/head, and multiple swings with closed fists at my head.” Harris also claimed that McAlpin had a “fighting stance with his legs planted for stability and force delivery” and that McAlpin “made it clear to me in the moment that he was not simply assaulting me in order to get away but engaging in assaults to cause me harm and injury”.

However, the body camera footage as well as additional surveillance camera footage showed Harris lunging out of his car first and charging towards McAlpin, who initially had his arms by his side.

The body camera footage proceeds to show one of the officers saying “tase him” and while McAlpin is pinned to the ground, the officers tase him four times. The body camera footage also showed the officers punching McAlpin at least 10 times on the head and back.

At one point, a woman who identified herself as McAlpin’s wife arrived on scene and told the officers that her husband is disabled, according to body camera footage.

“He’s deaf and he’s got cerebral palsy. And I’ve been on the phone with him since Circle K,” the woman, who was later identified in the police incident report as Jessica Ulaszek, said. “I’ve been on the phone with him the whole time. He didn’t assault nobody,” she added. Ulaszek also asked the officers to let McAlpin know that she was on scene to which they responded: “No, he doesn’t need to know,” NBC reports.

The officers made no mention of McAlpin’s cerebral palsy in the police incident report.

Speaking to ABC15, McAlpin’s attorney Jesse Showalter said: “He’s deaf. He couldn’t understand what they were doing. And he had done nothing wrong … Everything I see in that video is Tyron just trying to avoid being harmed by these officers and that only makes them increase the escalation and the violence that they’re using.”

In response to the body camera footage, Andre Miller, vice-president of the Arizona chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: “This brutal assault was due to the false claims of a white citizen, reminiscent of many falsehoods like Emmett Till that have claimed the lives of black citizens in America … Tyron was not a suspect in an actual crime, he had not done anything wrong, and he also has communication challenges,” NBC24 reports.

Similarly, the Arizona commission for the deaf and hard of hearing said that it was “deeply disheartened by the unwarranted incident during a law enforcement interaction with a Black, Deaf, plus disabled individual whose language is ASL”.

Darrell Hill, policy director of Arizona’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, said that the body camera footage showed “another devastating example of Phoenix police department’s racial bias and use of excessive force against people who do not pose a threat to them, including those with disabilities”, CBS reports.

On Monday, the Phoenix police department said that there is an ongoing internal investigation into McAlpin’s arrest, NBC reports.

Meanwhile, Maricopa county attorney Rachel Mitchell said that she will review the case.

“Because of the attention on this case, I will personally review the entire file, as well as the totality of the video. I may reach a different conclusion, or I may not, but I believe this case merits additional scrutiny,” Mitchell said, CBS reports.

The incident comes just months after the justice department released a damning report in which it found that Phoenix police routinely discriminate against people of color and kill civilians without justification.