A handicapped, homeless man who made the mistake of arming himself with a pair of crutches paid dearly for his arrogance, courtesy of 14 San Francisco police officers who tackled him, pulled off his pants, and pinned him down on the ground for more than 10 minutes.
The video was captured on August 4th and published yesterday on Medium by writer Chaédria LaBouvier, who was walking by Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters when she noticed the commotion.
The man’s apparent crime? Walking while handicapped.
Witnesses said there had been a call about somebody waving sticks around. No one, at least no one that I stayed long enough after the filming, could say for sure where the call came from. One woman said that she heard someone say that one of the deli managers called. By the time I arrived where Joe Bland was (as we’ll call him), several officers had arrived on the scene, and forced this man to the ground, which is where this footage begins. And they held him down, much of the time half-naked, for at least half an hour on one of San Francisco’s busiest streets.
The sticks? They were his crutches. You can hear people in the background around say so much. From my vantage point on the shore of 8th street, I could see the man reluctantly hand over his crutches. The man, it turned out, only had one leg; the other was a prosthetic. It is often twisted and backwards in the video.
LaBouvier says the entire thing lasted around 30 minutes, though she only uploaded 11 to YouTube. In the edited clip, officers repeatedly step on both his real and prosthetic legs, pin his head to the ground, and expose his back and naked buttocks to the gathering crowd—even after he’s securely handcuffed.
The man was eventually taken away by medics, reportedly against his will, and the officers, perhaps figuring he’d learned his lesson, declined to charge him with a crime.
Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.