

A Florida police chief is defending two of his officers who were captured on video repeatedly kicking and hitting a suspect as he sat motionless at a roadside.

Noel Carter says the officers “literally beat me like a dog in the street” during the incident outside an Orlando nightclub last week.

Video of the incident

In the video, recorded on a local resident’s cellphone, one of the officers is seen kicking Carter in the side with considerable force at least six times before the subdued man keels over backwards on to the pavement.

But John Mina, chief of the Orlando police department, said the video was only “a small piece” of the incident, and that Carter brought the violence on himself because he was drunk and resisting an instruction to surrender.

“Based on what I know now, I have no reason to take them off the streets,” Mina said of the officers, who also struck Carter with a metal baton, pepper-sprayed him and fired a Taser at him several times.

“What you see in the seconds of that video is only a small piece of what happened. Based on witnesses and officer reports it is clear that Carter was intoxicated, resisting officers, uncooperative and attempted to flee multiple times.”

Two separate, grainy video clips recorded by bystanders appear to show Carter running away from the officers, and being struck by them at various points.

Natalie Jackson, the attorney representing Carter, a bank worker from Hollywood, Florida, said she had made a formal complaint against the police department and wanted the state attorney’s office to file criminal charges against the officers, David Cruz and Charles Mays.

At a press conference in Orlando, she disputed Mina’s version of events and denied her client was intoxicated.

“He was being kicked, and he was being hit, and he was Tased while he was doing nothing,” she said.

“You do not have to look at the totality to see the abuse that is done and the unlawful use of force by these officers. The police department is not trained to beat, punch, kick and Tase people who are in a submissive position.

“If it were you or I that kicked someone and used a weapon against them while they were sitting passively, we would be arrested. That doesn’t happen to the police.”

Carter, 30, who appeared at the press conference with a bandage on the side of his head, told reporters he was in Orlando to attend a concert with a girlfriend.

He admits they had a disagreement but denies fighting with her after she told him she was breaking up with him, as the police reports claim.

He was eventually arrested and charged with domestic battery, battery on a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest.

“I was choked, I was sprayed and I was essentially battered prior to any conveyance of what my disorderly conduct could have been,” he said.

The incident is now under investigation by the Florida department of law enforcement, Mina said.

An initial inquiry conducted by Andrew Gillespie, a sergeant with the Orlando police department, approved the officers’ use of force, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

“All tactics and techniques were objectively reasonable given the number of different opportunities [Carter] had to give up and the multiple different techniques used,” Gillespie wrote in his report.

“I approve the response to resistance.”

The newspaper also reported that neither officer had ever been the subject of disciplinary action, although Cruz, who was allegedly seen kicking Carter in the video, had been the subject of several past complaints from citizens about the way he treated them.

Mina suggested that his department had more evidence to offer the state investigation to support his officers’ use of force.

“We have information beyond the police reports about what happened at the beginning of the encounter and at the end,” he said.

Meanwhile, the woman who recorded the video from her apartment balcony overlooking the scene told local television station WKMG she was shocked by what she saw.

“That right there was unacceptable,” she said. “For me, recording that, I don’t have to see what happened. That was not OK.”