Video Captures Green Bay Police Brutally Assaulting Mouthy Bystander

Luke O'NeilApr 23rd, 2014, 2:31 pm

Yesterday the internet had a bit of fun with the New York Police Department’s hapless attempt at social media outreach by hijacking the #MyNYPD tag. On Monday came another reminder that it’s not only big city police departments that know how to get their hands dirty with a video from an incident in Green Bay that shows a police officer brutally assaulting a bystander to an arrest who had been criticizing him.

The video, which was posted to Facebook on Monday, has since been shared over 40,000 times, and tens of thousands of other times on various YouTube posts. It shows Green Bay Police Officer Derek Wicklund attempting to arrest a man for allegedly carrying a drink outside of a bar, while Joshua Wenzel and a crowd of onlookers question the reasoning behind the arrests. As is often the case when inebriated college kids and overly-aggressive police officers collide, things do not go well from that point.

Wenzel, who appears to be screaming expletives at the officer but posing no physical threat, is pushed onto a car, body slammed to the ground, then punched in the face by Wicklund. “I’m turning that in, that was brutal,” an onlooker yells. He is correct.

All of the officers in the video remain on duty, the Green Bay Press Gazette reports, although the department is conducting an investigation, they say. I wonder how that will go!

“We haven’t had, per se, a formal complaint filed, but based on the information we received (Monday) we have decided to start our own investigation,” Capt. Bill Galvin of the Green Bay Police Department said during a press conference Tuesday morning. “We’re going to be looking at everything that took place before, during, and after that incident.”

[…]

“Every complaint against an officer is investigated as fully as possible,” Galvin said. “In an incident like this we didn’t wait for someone to come forward and file a complaint, we felt something like this is something that should be looked at.

And so it will be looked at, all over the internet.

Elsewhere in police hurting people news, the Albuquerque Police’s reign of terror continues, as they’ve killed yet another person, the third in five weeks. The woman in question pulled a gun on the officer, which is a bit more understandable as a cause for use of force than yelling bad words.

It is not illegal to swear at a police officer.

Watch below, via YouTube: