The North Carolina police officer seen using a Taser and punching a black man in a video recently leaked to the news media had been suspended in the past, personnel records show, and was known as a “smart aleck,” according to a former supervisor.

The officer, Christopher W. Hickman, 31, was charged on Thursday with assault by strangulation, a felony, and assault inflicting serious injury and communicating threats, which are misdemeanors.

“I don’t know what happened to him over the years,” Rondell Lance, the president of the local Fraternal Order of Police and a 26-year veteran of the Asheville Police Department, said in a phone interview on Saturday. “Evidently something happened. It shocked us all that he would react in such a violent way.”

Mr. Lance, who retired as a sergeant in 2014, said Officer Hickman had worked for him for about a year when he was just starting out on the force.