Photo: Getty Images
A North Carolina Black woman is suing Fayetteville police after she was allegedly assaulted and unlawfully handcuffed by officers last month, per WBTW.
On Tuesday (October 25), Ja’Lana Dunlap, 22, and her legal team announced the lawsuit against the city of Fayetteville along with its police department and chief Gina Hawkins in front of a federal courthouse.
“You have to demand respect, whether they wear a badge or whether they're just in regular clothes,” Dunlap said. “And if you're wearing that badge if you're wearing a uniform, then you're supposed to protect and serve, not harm innocent people.”
Dunlap's cell phone caught part of her encounter with Fayetteville police on September 26.
The 22-year-old said she was on the job in a vacant lot owned by her employer and taking pictures of illegal trash dumped on the property when officers approached her.
Dunlap said she answered officers' questions about why she was in the area, but they still demanded identification.
When she refused to show them her I.D., officers handcuffed and assaulted Dunlap, though North Carolina is not a "Stop and Identify" state, per her attorneys.
Hawkins previously said in a statement that officers believed Dunlap could have been connected to the getaway of a “potentially violent suspect” a half mile away.
“I firmly believe that if she was a different color, this would never [have] happened,” said Harry Daniels, one of Dunlap’s attorneys.
A North Carolina Superior Court Judge granted Hawkin's petition on Tuesday to release the officer’s bodycam video of the incident, WBTW reports.
Daniels believes the footage will be “very telling.”
“It is gonna show exactly what we already know,” Daniels said of the bodycam video. “It’s going to show abuse of power, police power, intimidation, use of force.”
“It's also going to show the state of Ms. Dunlap because the video that was cut off only had a first-person viewpoint,” he added. “That body camera is gonna show what they were looking at and what they saw what was happening to her."
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