A new video has emerged online showing a police officer choking a Black man, who said he couldn’t breathe, outside a CVS store in Washington. The video, posted by Leezia Dhalla, captured part of the incident on Monday night to her Twitter page.
“Tonight I saw an armed police officer for @cvspharmacy punching & choking a man in the middle of the street in #DC,” Dhalla wrote in a tweet. “The man was struggling to say “I can’t breathe” & a different security guard had to tell the cop to let up so the man wouldn’t suffocate.”
In another post with video of the incident, she added: “In the first 20 seconds, the man struggles to breathe (he says “I can’t breathe”) as the police officer in the black vest chokes him.
“At 1:10, the guard in the white tells the police officer to let up. The officer was punching man before my camera recorded this.”
The video starts with the officer, who also appears to be Black, restraining the man in the middle of the street as he tells the officer: “Leave me alone, I ain’t bother you.”
The officer then starts choking the man using both hands and tells him to “stop resisting” several times as he lays on the ground.
“I can’t breathe, man,” the man can be heard saying.
“Calm down,” the officer tells him.
Around 20 seconds into the video, Dhalla can be heard telling the officer: “Get off of him, he can’t breathe.”
But the officer continues to restrain the man by the neck for almost another 30 seconds or so until a security guard intervenes.
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the incident.
Watch:
In the first 20 seconds, the man struggles to breathe (he says "I can't breathe") as the police officer in the black vest chokes him.
At 1:10, the guard in the white tells the police officer to let up. The officer was punching man before my camera recorded this.@CVSHealth #M4BL pic.twitter.com/dR7QQOealg
— Leezia (@AskLeez) July 14, 2020
The incident comes after weeks of protests against police brutality across the U.S. after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop on May 25.
