District Two State Attorney Willie Meggs is voicing concerns about how Tallahassee Police officers handled the arrest of an intoxicated woman last month.
A video, which was captured by the dashboard camera on a Tallahassee Police Department Car, shows two police officers removing a slight, middle-aged woman from the back seat of their patrol car in order to conduct a breathalyzer test. Before the officers remove her, she can be heard asking the officers for information about her children. The officers don’t answer and warn her they won’t ask her again to get out of the car. When she does, she’s slipped out of her handcuffs, and the officers move to put them on tighter. But, State Attorney Willie Meggs says what’s happens next is both “disturbing” and “troubling.”
“She was basically slammed into the back of a patrol car and slammed on the ground and her face pushed into the pavement and arms twisted behind her back and she ended up with some broken facial bones and had to have some surgery to correct that,” Meggs said.
The woman can be heard in the video screaming in pain and telling the officers they’re hurting her before asking again about her children. She tells the officers she thinks they broke her cheek, but they respond she is “fine.” Meggs says he feels the officers on the scene were never in danger of being hurt by the woman they were arresting. He says she was not being violent or mean-spirited and he says he is reviewing whether the officers used excessive force.
