Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna released graphic body cam footage of sheriff’s deputies arresting mothers and separating them from their babies. The arrest happened in July 2022 in Palmdale.
In the released footage the mothers are seen being forcibly separated from their children by deputies in the video a sheriff’s deputy is shown throwing two overhand punches at one of the women being arrested, while she was still holding her baby.
The arrests happened after deputies reportedly saw a vehicle without headlights late at night when the deputies pulled the vehicle over. They said they noticed a smell of alcohol and found four women, three of whom were holding babies in the vehicle.
Under California law, children under the age of 2 must ride in rear-facing car seat, due to the violation, deputies were attempting to separate the mothers and the babies to charge the mothers with felony child endangerment.
Luna held a news conference on July 12 to release the body cam footage.
Alex Villanueva was sheriff at the time of this event. He joined “Inside the Issues” host Alex Cohen to talk about the released body cam footage.
Villanueva became aware of the footage once it was released by the current sheriff. He said the reason for that was that the incident was a lower level use of force that didn’t rise to the executive level, staying within the North Patrol division for investigation.
“It was going through the way it was supposed to go through. It was being investigated internally. They referred it to the internal criminal investigations bureau. They declined to continue because they did not see a criminal element to it, so it reverted to an administrative case,” Villanueva said.
The released body cam footage has caused uproar from elected officials in Los Angeles over the deputies’ use of force. In a statement Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the video “enraging and disturbing.”
Villanueva takes issue with Luna for not releasing more footage from all the deputies at the scene.
“The sheriff failed to provide what the deputies were seeing. There was more than two deputies there. There was a lot of deputies there, so there were a lot of different angles,” Villanueva said.
For the part of the video that shows a deputy throwing punches at a mother, who was holding her 3-week-old baby, Villanueva said more information needs to be released in order to understand the deputy’s motives.
Villanueva said a potential justification for the punches thrown is if the deputy felt the mother’s actions were putting the baby’s safety at risk.
“If the deputy saw the mother clutching the infant so tightly that the infant was being injured, being asphyxiated by the mother,” Villanueva said. “...And if the child is being harmed, I’d say, ‘Oh, whatever you need to do to get the child out of the mother so that the child is not injured is priority No. 1.’”
Both the LA District Attorney and the LA FBI Office are investigating the use of force.
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