A viral video of a cop body slamming a man on Bourbon Street in New Orleans may lead to legal trouble for the officer.
Michael Hoffman, 39, says he is considering legal action because a cop body slammed him after a late night, The Times-Picayune reports. A bystander caught the incident on video.
The officer says the bar asked him to deal with a drunk customer who wouldn’t leave. Hoffman says he and his brother could not get their debit card back from a local bar, so they called the police. When the cop arrived, it didn’t go as planned.
In the video, a cop can be seen talking with the two brothers, trying to get them to leave. After several ignored requests, the cop attempts to make an arrest. They resist the cop, who then pushes one of them into a row of trash cans. He picks the other up and body slams him.
“I don’t see how anyone can look at that video and understand the response of that trooper,” Stephen London, Hoffman’s attorney, told The Times-Picayune. “I did not see any provocation on the part of my client.”
Hoffman was hit with a municipal summons for disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, public intoxication and criminal trespass.
State police later backed up the officer, saying he did the right thing.
“It’s easy to take a tape and pick it apart, but my troopers are dealing with a lot of people who are intoxicated and a lot of unknowns,” State Police Superintendent Col. Michael Edmonson told The New Orleans Advocate. “Unless you’re in the heat of the moment, you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know who these individuals are, where they’ve been and what they’re doing.”
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