TOLEDO, Ohio — Multiple Toledo police officers appear to repeatedly hit a man while making an arrest in a video posted online.
The man who recorded the incident on his phone, David Partin, said it happened the night of Oct. 24 on the corner of Navarre Avenue and Raymer Bouelvard in east Toledo.
According to representatives from the Toledo Police Department, the suspect in the video was stopped for traffic violations, and during the investigation was found to have multiple warrants including aggravated menacing and domestic violence charges. TPD claimed the suspect resisted arrest.
Partin said the video was hard to re-watch.
"Upsetting? No. Disappointing? I don't know if even that's the right word," he said.
Partin said his involvement in the incident began right after he picked up his son from work. Driving home, the pair saw the flashing lights of multiple police cruisers parked.
Partin said the suspect ran, but by the time they began recording, the suspect was already pinned by one officer, followed soon by two more.
"I had no clue who he was, but then I start seeing the dude punching him, and I'm like, 'Oh my God, there's already three dudes on him,' Partin said, "He's kind of an older guy, you can already hear him giving up and then you can hear the other cops say 'hit him again.'"
Throughout the video, an officer hits the man 12 times in the lower body and back before other officers came over. In the last few seconds of the video, the officers help the man to his feet, and begin patting him down.
Partin said his video didn't capture the entire aftermath of the incident, and that the man was vomiting afterward.
He said police are an asset to the community, but the event left Partin and his son shocked. Partin said he was once a criminal himself and that he has been taken down by police multiple times before, but that they have never gone as far as he saw Monday night.
"There's so many other ways that they took me down than balling their fists up," Partin said. "The only profession in the world that requires you to ball your hands up is boxing."
A TPD public information officer released a statement on the incident:
“The suspect in the video was stopped for traffic violations near Idaho and Raymer. During the investigation, the suspect was found to have multiple warrants, which included warrants for Aggravated Menacing and Domestic Violence. While officers were attempting to verify the warrants with Toledo Police Records, the suspect attempted to flee and began resisting arrest. The video recorded by a bystander is only a short portion of the entire incident. As in all incidents where force is used by a Toledo Police officer, this will be reviewed through ascending levels of Field Operations command per department policy.”