After a police unit raided a tanning salon and massage parlor on the north side of Chicago last summer during a prostitution investigation, things got ugly quickly when they detained a frightened store manager named Jianqing Klyzek.

While Klyzek sat on the floor in handcuffs, an officer then proceeded to strike her from behind, while another threatened to use an electronic taser gun on her “10 f**king times” after which officers threatened Klyzek and members of her family. All the while, a security camera quietly captured the events unfolding.

“You’re not f**king American! I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the f**k you came from,” one of the officers shouted at Klyzek (an American citizen born in China).

“You’re here on our borrowed time,” he continued. “So mind your f**king business before I shut this whole f**king place down….I’ll take this building. You’ll be dead and your family will be dead,” according to a transcription of the video provided for a federal civil rights lawsuit Klyzek brought against the city of Chicago and its police department on May 14.

In the immediate aftermath of this incident, however, and adding insult to injury, the police had pursued a felony indictment against Klyzek, as officers alleged that she bit and scratched them as they tried to subdue her. Klyzek might well have been convicted of such charges, too, had the security footage from the parlor’s camera not soon thereafter surfaced, the woman's attorney told reporters, according to The Chicago Tribune.

“She’s never been arrested before, and she hadn’t done anything wrong,” Klyzek's attorney, Torreya Hamilton, explained of her client, a licensed masseuse and naturalized US citizen. During the raid, the only salon worker charged with prostitution, Jihua Zhang, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, but her conviction was later expunged, reports the Chicago Sun Times.

Let’s go to the tape

But, after Hamilton obtained the parlor’s surveillance footage, which revealed the officers’ reprehensible actions, she shared this footage with Illinois State Attorney Anita Alvarez. The prosecutor's office, upon reviewing the footage for the first time after the grand jury investigation had begun, then proceeded to drop the felony charges against Klyzek, according to a statement from Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Alvarez’s office, provided to The Chicago Tribune.

While the Chicago Police Department did not respond to our requests for comment, a Chicago police spokesman named Adam Collins told The Chicago Sun Times that the authorities are investigating the case. “The alleged comments, if true, are reprehensible and completely intolerable in our police department,” Collins explained. “We have codes of conduct that apply to officers, and if the allegations are proven accurate appropriate action will be taken.”

This isn’t the first time such alleged abusive policing has been caught on tape. Most notably, back in 1991, when video cameras were not nearly as prevalent as they are today, the recording of Rodney King being beaten by police officers became national news.

Fast forward to the present where surveillance cameras have proliferated, and these types of incidents are still all too common. For example, we recently wrote about a similarly disturbing case of abusive policing in which a Wisconsin resident named Tanya Weyker was involved in a serious car crash with a Milwaukee police officer’s vehicle in February of last year. The officer’s car had rolled through a stop sign and “T-boned” her car, breaking her neck and wrecking her vehicle.

While the cop tried to pin the accident on Weyker and arrested the sober victim for drunk driving, surveillance footage emerged showing that the officer caused the crash by failing to stop at a stop sign. What’s more, results of drug and alcohol tests administered at the hospital became available and confirmed Weyker’s sobriety at the time of the crash, thus vindicating her in the eyes of the law. Weyker then, understandably, filed suit against the officer.

Likewise, Klyzek has also filed suit based on her alleged abusive treatment by the police during the July raid, at which time she suffered cuts, scratches, and bruises.

Klyzek’s federal civil rights complaint, filed in US District Court in Illinois, accuses the officers and the Chicago Police Department of several violations of her rights under both the US Constitution and Illinois common and statutory law. Such charges include: false arrest, excessive force, Illinois common law malicious prosecution, Illinois battery, and Illinois civil hate crime.

On each count, Klyzek seeks a judgement against the officers “in a fair and just amount sufficient to compensate Plaintiff for the injuries she has suffered, plus a substantial sum in punitive damages, as well as costs, attorneys’ fees, and such other relief as is just and equitable.”

“I cannot imagine Supt. Garry McCarthy can face the citizens of this city and defend these officers’ actions,” Hamilton told The Chicago Sun Times. “This city was built by immigrants, and in 2014 we’re treating them like this?”