DALLAS (AP) — The Latest on woman’s cellphone footage of sons’ arrests in a Dallas suburb (all times local):
6:15 p.m.
A woman is asking for a suburban Dallas police officer to be fired after she released a video of the officer arresting her two sons earlier this month.
Latasha Nelson said Thursday that she was “terrified” when the Arlington officer wouldn’t tell her where her sons were being taken. She says she filed a use of force complaint after the officer grabbed her second son by the face and pushed him to the ground to handcuff him for interfering.
It’s difficult to see the exchange in the video because it is zoomed into the officer’s chest when the arrest happens. The officer had arrested Nelson’s younger son moments earlier for questioning in a car burglary reported at their apartment complex.
Nelson alleges that police took her cellphone while making the July 3 arrests and offered to drop the charges in exchange for the video when she went to retrieve her phone. She was able to access the video through her cloud storage.
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2 p.m.
A woman says police in the Dallas suburb of Arlington offered to drop charges against her two teenage sons in exchange for cellphone video she shot that she says shows an officer needlessly pushing her older son to the ground and arresting him.
The Next Generation Action Network, a Dallas-based group that lobbies against police violence, posted the video on its Facebook page Wednesday and scheduled a news conference for Thursday that will include the boys’ mother, Latasha Nelson.
Dominique Alexander, a group spokesman, says Nelson alleges that police took her cellphone while making the July 3 arrests and offered to drop the charges in exchange for the video when she went to retrieve her phone. He says the video was backed up to the cloud, which enabled her to let the group post it online.
A police spokeswoman, Sgt. VaNessa Harrison, said Thursday that the department is “looking into the situation.”