Voices, Votes & Vision: The Latest in Politics & Public Policy
It was only after Jasmine Taylor told the Georgia cops who had violently arrested her that her partner had recorded the arrest that they decided to release her from jail with no charges.
But that was only after she spent two nights in jail on a misdemeanor charge of reckless driving.
Then, once the 26-year-old Black woman was released from jail, she uploaded the videos to TikTok, where they have gone viral, exposing the Woodstock police officers for lying in their police reports, accusing her of “fighting” the cops.
But the video shows she was the one who was attacked and slammed to the ground by Woodstock police officer Justin Davis, who tells her, “I’m about to f-ck you up” for simply asking the officers why they had ordered her out of her car over a speeding violation.
That question annoyed the cops, so they took a speeding infraction, usually punishable by a citation, and elevated it to a reckless driving charge, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
But in their reports, they accused her of being “annoyed” and “indifferent” after being informed she had been speeding when the video shows she acknowledged the speeding but was merely asking why she had to step out of the car rather than being handed a citation and being allowed to leave.
Now, Taylor, a U.S. Navy veteran, has retained an attorney and plans to sue the Woodstock Police Department, which patrols a city about 30 miles north of Atlanta.
“He body slammed me and used his knee to push my head into the ground, and that’s how I ended up with a chipped tooth,” Taylor said in an exclusive interview with Atlanta Black Star.
“I was screaming, telling him that I could not breathe, and the female cop and the other cop came out of nowhere and moved him off me,” Taylor said.
“And they lied in their report and said that I was fighting him, but nowhere was I fighting him.”
Watch the video below, which confirms she was not fighting Davis, who was named Woodstock Rookie Officer of the Year for 2023.
Aggressive Arrest
The incident took place on June 29 as Taylor was working for Instacart, delivering a food order to a customer. Her partner was in the back seat when she was pulled over for speeding, accused of driving 51 mph in a 25 mph speed zone.
“I explained to them that I understood that I had been speeding and I was just trying to get the order taken care of so I could go get some gas because I was low,” Taylor described.
She said she handed the cops her information, and they walked back to the patrol car for a few minutes before the female cop returned and ordered her out of the car without explaining why.
“So I was confused and I asked her why, and told her ‘I’ve never been arrested. Why do I have to get out of the car? ‘What’s going on?’”
But the cop kept demanding that she step out of the car.
“I drive barefoot and I told her, ‘OK, I’m just trying to put my shoes on,’ but before I could say anything else, the third officer [Davis] reached inside the car and opened the door and told me, ‘I’m not asking you to get out of the car,’” she recounted.
“So I said, ‘Why are you being aggressive? I just said, I’m putting on my shoes. Like, what’s going on? Why are you being so aggressive?’ He ignored me. That’s when I told my partner in the back seat to start recording.”
Once out of the car, she was told to walk to the back of the car, where she continued conversing with the female cop, asking why they were escalating a routine traffic stop for speeding.
“I was asking her, ‘Why is he being so aggressive? I’ve never been pulled over. I’m a military veteran. I have a clean background. You’ll see that. It’s on my ID. It’s on my license,” Taylor said.
“I understand if I was speeding, so I’m not making any excuses for that. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m just trying to figure out why it’s going this extreme.”
“And before I could say anything else to her, he interrupted me and said, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and he slammed me to the ground and said, ‘I’m about to f-ck you up.’”
His vulgar threat was caught on video and even documented in the arrest reports, but they claim it was only a response to her fighting the cop, which she was not doing.
“I said, ‘if I was white, he would have never did this. And she said, No, that’s not the case. It’s not a race thing,” she said.
But there’s an entire Reddit thread discussing how racist and aggressive the cops are in Woodstock.
The Coverup
Once she was sitting in the back of the patrol car with her hands cuffed behind her back, she said she heard the cops speaking through an open window.
“I heard every single thing that they were saying about the situation of how he handled it and saying that they were not going to put in their report, so they ended up calling over the radio and saying that I fought the cop, so additional officers arrived on the scene,” she recalled.
She was jailed on a $1,000 bond, she says, but two days later, a cop told her she was being released with no bond because the charges had been dismissed. And this happened only after she had informed them that her partner had recorded the arrest on video, Taylor recalled.
“They told me I could go home, and I asked if my bond was made, and they said no, ‘They dropped the charges, you should be happy,’” she said. “But I told them that I’m still going to sue.”
One of the first things she did in her fight for justice was upload the videos to her TikTok channel, where they have been viewed and shared thousands of times.
The Instacart customer she was delivering to that night never received their food, but Taylor said she explained the situation to the company, and they allowed her to continue working.
“They understood and apologized for what happened,” she said.
But she never received an apology from the cops who violently arrested her.
“They were treating it as if it was no big deal,” said Taylor.
The Woodstock Police Department said Thursday it has fired Officer Davis after a use-of-force investigation determined he violated the department’s use-of-force policy.
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