NYPD Officers Wrestle Pregnant Mother to the Ground.
New York City police officers are under investigation after a bystander used a smartphone to capture a particularly rough arrest of a Brooklyn woman five months pregnant, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The video shows the arrest of Sandra Amezquita, a Colombian immigrant and mother of four, who fell belly first onto the pavement as officers wrestled her to the ground and cuffed her hands behind her back. The incident occurred during an early morning melee Saturday in Sunset Park, a neighborhood sometimes called Brooklyn’s “Little Latin America.”
The video also shows another officer violently shoving an unidentified woman to the pavement as she stands near the arrest. Police issued Amezquita a summons for disorderly conduct, but the other woman, reported to be a friend, was neither arrested or accused of a crime. The disturbing video is a blow to the Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has made a priority of improving police relations with minority communities, after more than a decade of bitter contention over NYPD tactics. It created a fresh community-relations crisis for the NYPD, which this summer has endured criticism from minorities after Eric Garner suffocated as police wrestled him to the ground in July.