An Alabama police department has placed an officer on administrative leave after she was filmed using a stun gun on a man who was already handcuffed.
A 45-second video of the incident, filmed by the victim’s brother Saturday and posted online, shows the unidentified officer from the Reform Police Department standing over 24-year-old Micah Washington with a stun gun pressed against his back as he was handcuffed and leaning on the hood of the officer’s car on Dec. 2.
Washington tells the officer that he’s armed, at which point she removes his gun, laughs and says, “Oh, yeah.”
“What you saying ‘Oh, yeah’ for?’” he asks. The officer then fires her stun gun into his back repeatedly and tells him to “shut the fuck up.”
Through tears and wails, Washington cries out “OK!” and “Oh, my God!” But the officer continues to use the stun gun on him.
“You want it again?” the officer asks. “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad, shut your bitch ass up.”
“The department is in the process of turning over all materials related to this arrest to the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation and has requested a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the arrest,’’ Reform Police Chief Richard Black and Mayor Melody Davis said in a joint statement posted to Facebook on Monday.
Black and Davis confirmed that the officer was placed on administrative leave, as department protocol requires.
Washington’s girlfriend, Jalexis Rice, said the officer stopped while Washington and two others were changing a tire, according to WVTM-TV in Birmingham.
According to the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office, Washington was booked Saturday under multiple charges — including obstructing governmental operations, resisting arrest, marijuana possession, drug trafficking and possessing a firearm as an ex-felon. He was released Tuesday.
At a rally for Washington on Monday, his mother, Toris, urged Black mothers to have conversations with their sons about “situations like this,” according to ABC 33/40 in Birmingham.
“I just thank God the situation did not turn out worse,” she added.