Last month, a Grand Jury in Jasper, Texas, cleared two police officers after they assaulted a black woman named Keyarika Diggles in Jasper City Jail in May of 2013. The whole incident
was caught on tape.
Police station surveillance video showed the officers wrestling Keyarika Diggles to the ground while dispatcher Lindsey Davenport watched. One of the officers grabbed a handful of Diggles hair and slammed her against the police station counter. Together they dragged her by her feet into a darkened holding cell.
What was her crime?
A partially unpaid parking ticket.
Along with the damning video footage, the case was troubling because Cunningham and Grissom had arrested Diggles at home that morning for nothing more than an unpaid traffic ticket. And the ticket wasn’t quite unpaid—the single mother of two had been paying down her debt in monthly installments. Even after those payments, she still owed $100 at the time Grissom and Cunningham knocked on her door—but it’s still not clear why they’d chosen to arrest her that day.
Diggles received $75K in a civil suit. Jasper's city council voted to can Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham, the two cops who beat Diggles. While this is is good news, it's still astounding that such a violent incident was caught on tape and still resulted in no indictment.
The graphic video of the incident is below the fold.