The officer caught on film firing pepper spray/mace into a crowd of motorcyclists on the highway has already been suspended by his precinct as this incident is under investigation. At this point nothing is 100% confirmed, but what we’ve got on our hands is footage of a Fort Worth police officer pulling over on the side of the highway, just ahead of a group of motorcyclists, and as those bikers approach you can see him pull the canister out of his belt and fire the spray into the oncoming group.
The bikers then reported that spray to be mace or pepper spray. This would make sense because that canister’s spray has the exact same trajectory when fired as pepper spray or mace. As for ‘why’ the Forth Worth cop fired his weapon, well, that question is still very much up in the air.
One of the bikers in the caravan has his helmet camera running and captured footage of the entire incident, including the moment the cop exits his car and fires spray into the oncoming group of bikers:
WFAA.com reports:
Fort Worth police confirmed Monday morning they started investigating the video as soon as they received it. FWPD Corporal Tracey Knight says pepper-spraying drivers is not a department-endorsed tactic.
News 8 spoke Monday to Jack Kinney, the man who recorded the video with his helmet camera, and Chase Stone, who edited the video and posted it to Facebook.
They say a group of about 200 motorcyclists were traveling up northbound U.S. 287 in Fort Worth Sunday afternoon when a Fort Worth police officer pulled over one of the motorcycle group’s “safety vehicles,” which is a vehicle that follows behind bikers in case of an incident.
In the edited video, which slows down and zooms in at one point, so viewers can see more clearly, the officer appears to spray something directly into oncoming traffic as he exits his vehicle. The bikers say it was pepper spray.
“It’s the last thing I would expect to see,” Kinney said.
“His intent was to hit the bikers for sure, there’s no doubt about it,” Stone says.
Here’s another look in GIF:
http://imgur.com/dcAKfrG
http://imgur.com/dibnap3
That evidence is pretty damming.
Under normal circumstances I’d say that it’s not fair for one person to claim they know the intent of another person’s actions, because there can always be extraneous factors at play, but in this particular instance the assertion that the cop’s intent was ‘to hit the bikers’ with spray seems somewhat accurate. If his intent wasn’t to hit the bikers with spray then why else would he rush out of his care and fire directly into the crowd?
As someone who once nearly had my arm pulled out of my socket in Forth Worth simply for leaving a concert venue and looking like someone who was drunk (spoiler alert: I was sober), I’m not surprised at all that this incident took place in Forth Worth, Texas.