Two police officers have been fired and three others placed on desk duty over excessive use of force during a protest arrest incident involving two college students, Atlanta's mayor said Sunday.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said at a news conference that she and police Chief Erika Shields made the decision after reviewing body-camera footage of a Saturday night incident that first gained attention from video online and on local news.
The video, shown on TV as captured by local reporters, shows a group of police officers in riot gear and gas masks surround a car being driven by a man with a woman in the passenger seat. The officers appear to fire a stun gun at the woman and then pull her from the car. They then use a stun gun on the man. They use zip-tie handcuffs on the woman on the ground. The couple did not appear to be fighting police.Bottoms said the woman, Taniyah Pilgrim, was released without charges.
Bottoms said she had spoken to leaders at Spelman College and Morehouse College, where she said the the young people were students. She said she'd also spoken to representatives for the students but hadn't yet spoken directly to them. "When wrong is wrong, we have to, as law enforcement, start dealing with it in the same manner that we would deal with it with non-law enforcement," Shields said. "For some reason, we've fallen into a gray area where there's a separate set of rules for law enforcement, and if we want to get out of this space that we're in now we have to change how we manage internally.
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