Police: Officer’s actions in arrest ‘disturbing’

Confrontation in street becomes chaotic, violent.

It began innocuously enough.

A man started crossing a street, just as a vehicle drove through the intersection. As he finished crossing, another car went by in the opposite direction.

The man’s movements caught the attention of a Sacramento police officer who called him over.

“You’re jaywalking,” the officer said.

Less than a minute later, the encounter devolved into a chaotic and violent episode. Video recordings show the officer, who is white, throwing the man, who is black, to the ground and pinning him, before striking him in the face at least a dozen times.

“Oh my God!” screamed Naomi Montaie, who recorded a video of the episode and posted it on Facebook.

The encounter, which took place Monday, is the latest in a series of incidents involving police use of force that have been captured on video and spread widely on social media. Such episodes have given rise to distrust between law enforcement and black and Hispanic communities, especially since the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Sgt. Bryce Heinlein, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, acknowledged those “trust issues” in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Authorities issued two statements, posted three videos recorded from inside police vehicles and linked to the video recorded by Montaie. They did not identify the officer, but in one statement the department called his actions “disturbing.”

The department also placed the officer on paid administrative leave and began an administrative inquiry by its internal affairs division and a criminal investigation by a special unit within the department. The Sacramento County district attorney’s office will decide whether to file charges.

“This is kind of uncharted water, where we go out with public information on an internal investigation,” Heinlein said. “Unfortunately we had an incident that looks poorly on our department, and we’ll learn from it.”

The scene began to unfold around 5 p.m. Monday when the officer exited his vehicle and approached the man, who has since been identified as Nania Cain. Video shows the officer asking him to take his hands out of his pockets and Cain complies, raising them, and saying, “I looked both ways.”

The officer eventually tells the man to stop. He then instructs Cain to “get down on the ground, now,” repeating the order several times as Cain takes off his jacket.

Cain complains of being harassed and, just before being taken down, he tells the officer, “If you’re a real man, you can take your gun away, and fight me.” The video then shows the officer charging Cain.

“For an unknown reason, the officer threw the pedestrian to the ground and began striking him in the face with his hand multiple times,” police said in a statement.

Cain was charged with resisting arrest, but authorities said they released him Tuesday morning after deciding “there were insufficient grounds for making a criminal complaint.”