This is footage from Jeffersontown high school where 3 police officers are seen head slamming and kicking student. Then aims taser at crowd. pic.twitter.com/JEvbVPjwfa
— YUNG STFU (@drillareese) November 1, 2017
Three police officers have been accused of over-stepping their authority after an incident caught on video shows a high school student being tasered and brutally arrested.
On November 1, two students were engaged in a minor scuffle at Jeffersontown High School in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.
One of those students was Rajae Tinker. The argument was apparently over a pair of headphones. Eventually, a school resource officer tried to calm down the participants. At some point, Roghae Tinker, Rajae’s brother, intervened.
Jefferson County Public Schools spokesman Daniel Kemp said the second Tinker brother’s intervention prompted the student resource officer to request back-up from Jeffersontown Police.
And then, according to Jeffersontown Police Chief Ken Hatmaker, one of his men was “sucker-punched.” He said, “I saw my officer attacked, hit in the head.”
The video cuts in on three officers attempting to forcibly subdue Roghae. He is on his stomach with the knees of two officers pressed into his back. A third officer repeatedly kicks the young man. Onlookers scream at the police to stop. The cops do not oblige the crowd.
Soon, the scene gets ever more chaotic as bodies fly and lunge across the eye of the camera lens. The onlooking students continue to scream as the police wrest the Tinker brother to the ground, finally, tasering him in the process. The video ends with his body twitching on the white-tiled ground.
The boys’ mother, Quinnita Dobson, found the police’s actions that day wholly unnecessary. In an interview with local media outlet WDRB, she said:
There’s no reason why they should be kicking him and kneeing him and tase him while he is already on the ground. It’s three big police officers.
Roghae Tinker, for his part, agrees and disagrees with the actions taken by police that day. He said:
He had the right to put me down but not to tase me. I was already down. There were three officers on me, and I couldn’t do nothing, and he just came in and tased me.”
Around 1 p.m., our school resource officer (SRO) intervened in a fight between two students in the cafeteria. One of those students attempted to fight the SRO, which prompted him to request assistance from Jeffersontown Police. As the SRO led the student out of school, the students’ brother, accompanied by several other students, then escalated a fight with another police officer—resulting in the officer deploying a Taser on the student. I want you to know that these kinds of incidents will not be tolerated at Jeffersontown High School. I am in the process of reviewing school security footage to determine every student involved in this afternoon’s incident, and those students will be disciplined to the fullest extent our policies will allow.
