But For Video: “You A Dumb Bitch” Edition

It’s not clear that 36-year old daughter of a Maryland Capital police officer, Kianga Mwamba has her Ph.D. in particle physics from Johns Hopkins. Then again, it’s not clear that she doesn’t. But she does know that she has the right to video police in the performance of their public duties.  And she did.

Some Baltimore cops, Stepanie Uruchima, Kelly Larson, Erick Jackson, and Marlon Koushall, apparently didn’t think Mwamba knew as much as she did, so they tased her for it, deleted the video and arrested her. Because reasons.

Mwamba, 36, flicked on the video recorder on her cell phone, telling officers she was allowed to record. But the situation quickly devolved into Mwamba’s being hauled from her Toyota, tasered and charged with assaulting two police officers.

On the video, you can hear cops commanding her to pull her car over, but she explains that her car was surrounded by police, making it impossible to move without running the cops down. They hate that, you know.  So they tased her, as you can clearly hear on the video, then arrested her.

And when Mwamba was bailed out of jail that Monday morning, she said the video she made appeared to have been deleted from her phone. It was only when she checked another app that backed up her images and videos to the cloud that she found she still had a copy, she said.

Snap. Maybe the cloud isn’t all bad?  But the best part of the video is where an officer tells her, “You a dumb bitch, you know that?” What are the chances anyone would have believed that these words were said had it not been captured on video?  Envision the police report stating, “the officer thereupon informed the perpetrator that her decision to attempt to murder police officers by running them over with her vehicle was a poor choice.”  Because that’s basically the same thing, only in slightly more official language.

The charges against Mwamba were dropped, and she is suing Baltimore and the cops involved.  I don’t think she’s a “dumb bitch” at all. Not at all.

H/T Turley and PINAC

5 thoughts on “But For Video: “You A Dumb Bitch” Edition

  1. Amy Alkon

    Horrifying. Thank you for posting this. Every time I see/hear one of these, I think of how many have not been lucky enough to find their video on the cloud, etc.

    1. SHG Post author

      For all the reasonable and appropriate limits to video, it’s made an unbelievable impact on our ability to see and hear that which was dismissed out of hand before video existed. The claims that this was what was happening on the street were always there, but no judge ever believed it until video.

  2. Marc R

    Baltimore PBA spokesman:

    “The video clearly depicts Mwamba engaging in ventriloquism in an effort to discredit those officers attempting to save her life. While we fully intend to investigate her attempts to smear our officers’ stellar reputation, we express gratitude that the officers were able to deescalate the situation and restore order. Even a cursory glance at her criminal history shows several possible municipal ordinance violations and two of her known associates have booking histories.”

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