A Sheriff’s Deputy Arrived — and Beat Her Some More
Shantel Arnold was already having a bad day before her encounter with the cop.
Arnold was attacked by three boys as she was walking down the street. The boys slammed Arnold to the ground and beat her while a crowd watched and laughed. She tried to defend herself with a stick. The assault ended only after 71-year-old Lionel Gray, whom Arnold considers her stepfather, chased the boys away.
Disheveled and covered in dirt, Arnold stumbled down the road toward her home when an unidentified sheriff’s deputy rolled up beside her in his patrol car.
In the transcript of her interview with an internal affairs investigator, Arnold says: “I’m on my way home. I ain’t make it all the way to the block, the police come out of nowhere, swarming, getting me like, ‘Come here.’ I’m like, ‘What’s going on? I just got beat up by two children, what ya’ll doing?’”
The cop demanded that she talk to him. Arnold told him she was assaulted and wanted to go home.
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office is investigating a deputy caught on video holding a Black woman by her hair and slamming her head repeatedly into the pavement, with such force that a witness to the Sept. 20 incident said it ripped several of Shantel Arnold’s braids from her scalp.
The video begins with a JPSO deputy seen holding the wrist of Arnold, who is lying on her back on the sidewalk. The deputy appears to be dragging her along the pavement. The deputy then grabs Arnold’s arm with his other hand and jerks her upwards, lifting her entire body off the ground.
They briefly disappear behind a parked white vehicle. When they come back into view, the deputy is holding Arnold by her braids, slamming her repeatedly onto the cement. At one point, he whips her down so violently her entire body spins around and flips over.
The cop then puts his knee in her back.
✱Shantel Arnold is 34, 4’ 8”, about 100 pounds and is missing her left eye.
✱Deputies at the scene called an ambulance and she was taken to a hospital.
✱Shantel was not charged with a crime.
✱Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said the video of Arnold and the deputy was “yet another testament to the shocking frequency that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office targets and brutalizes innocent, unarmed members of the Black community.”
Watch her encounter with the cop.
