Reform Police Officer Placed On Leave Over Video Showing Her Taser and Mock Handcuffed Driver
A West Alabama police officer has been placed on administrative leave after she was filmed mocking a handcuffed man she Tasered while he was unresisting.
The video is less than a minute long and does not show what transpired to lead to the driver's arrest, but shows a white officer with the Reform Police Department take a Black man, handcuffed behind his back, and lean him over a parked cruiser.
The officer holds her Taser in direct contact with the man's back, then appears to remove a gun from the man's waistband before shouting, "Oh yeah!" and activating the Taser.
Reform is a small city of about 1,500 and is in Pickens County about 30 miles east of Tuscaloosa.
Warning - the embedded video of the interaction below may be disturbing to some viewers and contains language.
In the clip, the officer orders the man to "shut the f*ck up" while he is being shocked before berating him as the video ends.
"You want it again?" the officer asks as the detained man cries. "Shut the fu*k up, you was big and bad, shut your b*tch ass up."
In a press release Monday, Reform Chief of Police Richard Black and Mayor Melody Davis said the state has launched an investigation into the arrest.
"The Reform Police Department is aware of a video circulating involving a citizen's arrest on December 2, 2023," their statement said. "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."
The mayor and chief said the officer in the video has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation goes on, and they direct all questions about the case to ALEA's SBI.
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