A violent arrest by L.A. County deputies was caught on video. Now the man is seeking justice.
On Sept. 24, 2013, a local man named Steven Williams was pulled over in his car by two officers for “making an illegal turn.” Williams was driving south on the 10 Freeway in his black Ford Focus.
Officers approached the car and asked to see his driver’s license. When he told them that he didn’t have it, they asked him to exit the vehicle. The driver said he knew that he had to have it or the officers would issue him a citation and arrest him. He opened the car door and started to get out when an officer tried to pull him back, saying he had to wait for backup.
“Then they jumped on the hood and grabbed me back,” Williams told Business Insider. “I was like, ‘What?’ They said ‘get your hands on the wheel now.’”
They pushed him back into the car and one officer told him to put his hands behind his back and the other put his belt around his neck. He still had his seat belt on. By that point there was a third officer called to help.
What happened next was caught on a security camera.
“I’m in my car, I heard the guy behind me and then I saw the guy put his belt around my neck and then he started to choke me…and I was like, you can’t do that, I don’t know how to do that,” Williams said.
The video also captured the incident outside Williams’s car. The suspect had the gun, which was later confirmed by the LAPD to be real.
“I saw the gun and I was like this is not right,” Williams said.
The suspect had a permit to carry, but did not display a holster or any other sign of being trained in the use of a weapon. At the time, officers did not know that Williams’s Ford Focus was stolen.
In the footage, Williams is heard screaming: “I need my weapon! I need my weapon!”
Then an officer yells at the driver: “Just give him the weapon, man, or I’m coming in and I’m gonna shoot you in the face and kill you in the back of the head.”
“I was like, yeah, why not, what’s the point in trying to shoot me?” Williams recounted.
“I need my weapon,