Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post
Tamara Gaglione was recently paid $250,000 in damages for being pulled over for talking on her cellphone, after which she was thrown to the ground and hogtied by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers on the shoulder of a busy freeway.
This type of behavior, while indeed disgusting, is far from surprising given that police hogtying women isn’t all that rare and a woman died of suffocation last year in the back of a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car after being kicked in the genitals and forced into the vehicle.
In this case, it seems that the dashboard camera is what ultimately held the officers accountable, just as a similar camera did in the case of a 66-year-old man who was beaten for no apparent reason.
The incident occurred in August of 2011 and resulted in charges of evading and resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license, all of which were dropped after a judge saw video footage of the incident captured from a dashboard camera of a CHP cruiser.
30-year-old Gaglione was pushed face-first into the asphalt after an officer swept her legs with a kick. Another officer used his knee to pin her to the ground, all while she was 2-months pregnant.
Howard Price, Gaglione’s attorney, told the Huffington Post that Gaglione could hear officers talking about the video of the encounter on the way to the station.
Yet when Price requested the video in order to present it as evidence in Gaglione’s criminal trial, he was told no footage of the incident existed.
“I went back to them, and I said, ‘Look, am I stupid? This involved a chase. There must be a videotape,’” Price said.
Eventually, the prosecutor finally handed over the footage from the dashboard camera of a backup officer, although that footage showed nothing.
Once Price was told the footage did in fact exist, he was told that no one could transfer the video to another medium.
Price was then forced to go to the CHP station himself in order to record the footage for posterity.
The video Price took of the original CHP footage being played was then uploaded to YouTube and can be seen below.
“The conduct here is outrageous. What these officers did here was bewildering to me. They knew she was pregnant,” Price told the Los Angeles Times. “She never resisted arrest.”
“After first stopping on the right shoulder, she was ordered to not stop there, to go forward and get off freeway [sic],” Price explains on his website. “Because of rush hour traffic noise, she did not hear clearly what she was directed to do.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the officers ordered her to toss her car keys out of her window, exit her vehicle and put her hands on the car.
Instead, Gaglione simply stands outside of her vehicle staring at the CHP officers, “appearing confused,” as the Los Angeles Times puts it.
When the officers are yelling, “Turn around,” it appears that Gaglione says something, although it is inaudible.
In the official report, the CHP officers claimed that she appeared to raise her arms in a menacing manner, although it is quite hard to detect if there are any menacing arm movements from the footage.