“I wonder what you think about it. My main point is that the man still wasn’t taken into custody, and that to physically overwhelm him with force might have been a reasonable thing to do, given the circumstances.”
Six cops can easily physically overwhelm the average size dude without resorting to using fists ...
Especially given that he was complying with directives and was face down on the ground.
He probably deserved a whupping, but it should have been done out of the sight of cameras, at the police station. That was standard operating procedure in the past, well before the prevalence of cell phone video recording.