The night of Jan. 29 wasn’t a good one for Robert Asberry, a San Francisco area resident who happened to be intoxicated while riding on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train.
Eyewitnesses at the scene said a policeman gave multiple commands to Asberry to get off a train at a station in San Bruno, but Asberry clearly resisted, according to videos posted online.
The officer then used his taser on Asberry inside the train car, bringing the suspect to the train floor. In the video, the BART officer tasing Asberry was alone and called for backup, which arrived about two minutes later.
“BART police were called to investigate reports of a man who was ‘drunk and harassing patrons’ on the train, according to a BART police log,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday.
After the two backup officers arrived, they took Asberry’s hands and arms and forced him on his stomach, after which the initial challenging officer tased Asberry again, even though he was restrained, as the video shows. Other passengers in the stopped train told the officers that Asberry hadn’t done anything wrong, as several more law enforcement personnel arrived on the scene, including firefighters.
The situation raises questions as to whether the situation was properly handled by law enforcement authorities. Some witnesses said Asberry, a parolee who had an open warrant for his arrest due to a parole violation, had not done anything to warrant the encounter with police.
Passenger and witness Vidya Kaipa wrote in a post on Medium entitled, “How Racial Profiling Leads to Tasering on BART,” that the incident was “awful and heartbreaking and outrageous.”
Kaipa wrote that although Asberry had complimented her, telling her she was beautiful and ‘classy’ and had ‘lightly touched’ her hair, she wasn’t bothered by his actions — but that someone may have called the police because of those actions, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
BART responded to Kaipa’s story on Medium on Jan. 31, saying in part that her post had “reached the BART Office of the Independent Police Auditor … investigates certain complaints that it receives involving the BART Police Department.”
According to the Chronicle report, BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey told journalists on Thursday he wouldn’t “prejudge” any of the allegations pending an investigation.
“I can certainly sympathize and empathize with what the public is saying,” Rainey said. “We are called to contact people at their worst, and a lot of times it is not pretty. Our first resort is to get voluntary compliance and, as you can see, that officer was extremely patient. The idea the officer has to wait to be struck or kicked or something else done to him before the officer has to wait to take defensive action, is just wrong. Once the first taser came, we want to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, with the least amount of injury or force to the suspect, and we don’t want the officer to get injured.”
The Chronicle report goes on to cite other incidents involving BART police in the past, most prominently the death of unarmed rider Oscar Grant on Jan. 1, 2009.
“Then-Officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot Grant in the back at the Fruitvale station in Oakland. He later testified that he had shot Grant accidentally while intending to subdue him with a taser,” the Chronicle noted. “Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.”
Tasers began to be incorporated into standard use by police departments in the early 2000s.
Full video of the incident:
Second video from a different angle: