Posted on 08/09/2013 10:32:44 AM PDT by Sopater
Chilling video from a home in Dekalb County, Ga., shows local police entering a house illegally, berating the home’s residents and then tackling them to the ground.
The entire incident took place because the mother of the home, Natania Griffin, was two weeks late on paying a $1,000 fee to the county.
Griffin’s 23-year-old son, Donovan Hall, recorded the event. He was alarmed and confused when police began banging loudly on his door in the middle of the night.
“I was immediately confused as to why the police would be at my house,” Hall told the Huffington Post. “The knocks became more and more aggressive.”
On the video (see below), Hall timidly opens the door and asks the police why they are at the house. But police quickly enter the home and soon pin Donovan and his brother on the ground.
“One officer hit me in the face with his gun and I fell to the floor,” Hall said. “Another officer began kicking me and bending back my arms. They put handcuffs on me and continued to kick and punch me. At that point, an officer with his knee in my back stood up and put both feet on top of my head. He was standing on top of my head.”
The officer’s continued being violent to the boys, even putting a Taser to the head of Hall’s younger brother.
“Why are you being so aggressive, sir?” Hall asks in the video. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”
The officers never answered Hall’s question.
Later in the video, an officer can be heard saying “I wish I could cane both of y’all.”
Griffin says she was never asked for her name or read her Miranda rights.
“It was a perfect storm of abusive power and arrogance,” she said. “They are criminals. Their conduct was criminal.”
Hall posted his video to YouTube where it received almost 200,000 views. The video ended up on the front page of Reddit.
The family hopes to hire a lawyer and press charge against the DeKalb Police Department, but they lack the funds to do so. They are hoping that the video will spread awareness of the incident and someone will agree to represent them without charge.
“Although it happened to my family, it’s a microcosm of the world,” Griffin said. “What about the other countless families who feel powerless against this kind of tyranny? Who is championing their cause? This is a problem.”
Dang... I thought I did a search on “dekalb”, but now wonder if I spelled it wrong.
Dang...
It sounds like they broke the exact same civil rights laws that the Rodney King cops were sentenced for.
I suspect these guys have prison time in their future.
Youtube could end the reign of the Good ol’ Boy.
Maybe its just the ease of communicating over the Internet, but there seem to be more and more of these stories. Do the police just ignore the Fourth Amendment these days?
It happens to me sometimes also.
Dekalb County, Ga will soon be owned by this family.
My husband would’ve killed every last one of those thugs if they’d come to our home like that. Thank God we live in a place where our Sheriffs are decent people who uphold their oaths!
Who sends LEO to collect unpaid debts (that are normally turned over to a collection agency unless it was a fine - story only says "fee")?
Just another example of LEO stepping over the bounds of decency. Just like unnecessary no-knock raids, why not just wait for the perp to walk out of the house? Not enough of a rush? I hope the county is sued to the ground, but hopefully the rules will be changed to disallow these kinds of threatening tactics.
Seems like this is happening more often, leading me to think the so far unviolated Third Amendment, the one that catalyzed the creation of the First and Second, will be next to see violated...
The cops are talking like uneducated street thugs...............
I dunno. Only if the cops are white and the little people are black, I'm sure. I didn't see the video.
Civil rights laws do not apply if the vics are white, especially if the perps are black. J. Christian Adams blew the whistle on this a few years ago, but nobody in the major media picked it up.
That’s exactly what I thought. The “narrator” sounded genuinely scared, better educated, and encouraged prayer.
OK, I watched the video, and the little people are black. However, so’s the big tough Deputy, so it’s a wash. They probably won’t get anything from the County.
” The family hopes to hire a lawyer and press charge against the DeKalb Police Department, but they lack the funds to do so. They are hoping that the video will spread awareness of the incident and someone will agree to represent them without charge.”
Are they kidding? There are thousands of lawyers who will gladly represent them. Not for free, but for a third of the settlement. So they won’t have to put any money up front. They should have representation by tomorrow afternoon.
I’m not thinking race. I’m thinking civil rights (since the officers were acting for the state). You can violate the civil rights of others for more reasons than just race.
You are 100% correct, in theory. But in practice, it’s quite another matter because the perp is a member of a protected class. In this case, I think the little people will win because there’s a video and it went viral, and they’re protected class too.
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