A Pennsylvania woman was arrested for the egregious crime of standing up for a group of black girls after she filmed a police officer kicking a group of young black girls out of a movie-theater arcade in North Versailles, Pa., telling them that they were “acting like animals.”
On Thursday morning, a Facebook user named Melanie Carter posted a video with the following caption:
In need of a Lawyer. I went to Phoenix Theater in North Versailles on February 23 at approximately 9pm when I pulled up an officer was pushing a young black girl out the door aggressively I asked the girl what happened and she said she was playing with her friends in the game room when officer Chris Kelly grabbed her from behind escorted her to the door and pushed her outside. The officer then went back inside and made several other black girls leave the theater I started filming at this point and was assaulted by the officer who banged my head on the concrete while placing his knee in my back and placed under arrest although I broke no laws. IM ASKING THE COMMUNITY TO HELP ME SEEK JUSTICE
The video shows a police officer walking up to the person operating the camera and asking for a light for his cigarette. The Root could not confirm that the cigarette was a Marlboro Red, but our investigative forensics team assured us that they could determine from the circumference of the paunch of his belly that the gentleman in question sometimes smokes Marlboro Reds, though the thinness of the officer’s lips and the angle of the dangling cigarette suggest that it could be a Pall Mall.
The camera then focuses on a group of three young black girls arguing with a man who appears to be an employee of the theater. The cop interrupts and tells them, “We have cameras [inaudible] watching you guys. You guys have been problems since you got in here!”
The theater employee suggests that one girl “separate herself,” saying that she could go back in, but the other two had to stay out. The officer intervenes, obviously aggravated by his impending nicotine withdrawal, and informs all three of the girls that they are kicked out of the establishment. “Well, he’s calling the shots,” says the theater worker in the J.C. Penney clearance-rack suit.
“See how they treat our kids?” the woman behind the camera can be heard saying. “They call them animals.”
“Because they’re behaving like an animal,” explains the assistant to the deputy vice manager of popcorn operations as he walks up to the woman who is filming the incident, breathing a satanic mist onto the camera lens.
As the kids try to ask the man if they can go back in, the woman continues to record. “It’s raining out here. It’s cold out here,” she says. “These kids have paid their own money to come in here, too. And they’re being persecuted.”
Officer Smoky then walks up to the woman, his Pall Mall now smoldering from the light that he received from his brief commune with the Beelzebub, and tells the woman she has to leave. When she tells him that she paid her money and that her kids are inside the theater, Puff the Magic Grand Dragon pulls out his handcuffs, somehow talking while not dropping the cigarette from between his lips.
The woman backs up, and the cop grabs her while telling her to leave the premises. At no point does he tell her she is under arrest. Then the cop grabs her arm, throws the woman to the ground and slaps handcuffs on her.
The woman exclaims to the undersecretary to the assistant director of ancillary ticket tearing that she has not broken the law and asks what she did wrong.
“Resisting arrest,” Officer Marl “Bo” Roman says.
“I didn’t break any laws; get off of me,” the woman screams as the video ends.
Although the incident is indicative of how white people view black youths and how cops treat ordinary citizens, in this particular case, if justice does not prevail, there’s always the chance that lung cancer will.
The Root has reached out to Melanie Carter and the Phoenix Theatres in North Versailles for comment.