Over the weekend, one New Jersey beachgoer captured brutal video of a police officer punching a 20-year-old during an arrest. Since the video went viral, police are investigating the arrest of the woman for alleged underage drinking. Watch the incident in the video above (trigger warning: it’s pretty graphic).
The video was first tweeted on Saturday by Twitter user @HewittLexy, according to NJ.com. In the video, a young woman is seen being wrestled into submission by two officers, one of whom appears to be punching her in the head repeatedly. There are several voices in the background yelling “Stop resisting!” Meanwhile, the woman being arrested yells “You’re not allowed to hit me and choke me like that.”
The woman in the video is Philadelphia resident Emily Weinman. According to NBC Philadelphia, Weinman wrote in a private Facebook post that the officers in the video suspected her and her friends of underage drinking and asked them to take a breathalyzer test. When the test came back negative, the 20-year-old alleged the cops wouldn’t let her go. “Therefore I asked them don’t they have something better to do as cops than to stop people for underage drinking on the beach, saying to that there’s so much more serious stuff going on,” she wrote, according to NBC. “The cop said, ‘I was gonna let you go but now I’ll write you up’ and he asked my name.”
“I tripped and fell and the cop tackled me to the ground and smashed my head into the sand,” she continued. “At that point, I blacked out and fought any way possible trying to get up and push him off me.”
Wildwood, New Jersey mayor Ernie Troiano Jr. claimed Weinman first attacked and spit on the officers, according to Philly.com. Both of the officers have been assigned desk duty as the police investigate the incident. “We don’t like to see anyone get hit, period. But then again, when you have someone who’s aggressively attacking you or spitting at you ... I wasn’t there. I don’t know,” Troiano said.
Weinman was charged with aggravated assault of a police officer, aggravated assault by spitting bodily fluids at a police officer, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, obstruction, and as a minor in possession of alcohol.
