Video: Nine Stockton police officers arrest an unarmed 16-year-old for jaywalking

It took nine police officers in Stockton, Ca. to arrest an unarmed, black 16-year-old for jaywalking and resisting arrest Tuesday—and police officials say the body camera of the first officer to address the situation was knocked off in the scuffle.

The arrest was caught on a cellphone video recorded and posted on Facebook by bystander Edgar Avendaño. The video, which was first reported by RT, shows an officer struggling with the teen, calling for backup as a crowd gathers, and then four officers pushing the teen to the ground as five others stand by.

Joseph Silva, a Stockton Police Department spokesperson, said the arrest happened Tuesday at 6:52 a.m. local time. The first officer saw the teen walking in a bus lane near the city’s transit center, and the teen “used obscene language” when the officer told him to walk on the sidewalk “for safety reasons,” Silva said.

(The teen “was like a foot off of the sidewalk, wasn’t in the middle of the street or nothing like that,”Avendaño wrote on Facebook.)

At the beginning of the video, the officer and the teen are struggling over the officer’s baton. “The officer was trying to detain him, and a scuffle ensued,” Silva said. “The officer’s body camera was actually knocked off of him.” Partway through the video, the officer can be seen picking up what appears to be the camera from the ground and pinning it back on his uniform. The object is on the ground at the beginning of the video.

The officer yells at the teen to stop resisting, and calls for backup as people start to gather around. “That’s a fucking kid!” a female bystander shouts repeatedly. “Don’t touch him, leave him alone!”

Soon, several other officers arrive, and the situation escalates quickly. One officer grabs the teen—who is sitting with his face in his hands—and lifts him up before pushing him down to the ground face-first. Four officers crowd around him, at least one sitting on him, and handcuff him, as others stand in front of the camera.

“He’s a baby!” the bystander yells. “He didn’t even do nothing!” The teenager is seen crying as he’s led to a police car.

He was brought to custody and released to his mother, Silva said. He’ll be charged in juvenile court with resisting arrest and trespassing (walking in a bus lane).

Any use of force by an officer triggers an automatic administrative review by the police department. “The totality of the circumstances is still under review,” Silva said, but “preliminarily, it looks like the officers were within policy,” he added.

All Stockton police officers in uniform now wear body cameras, a policy started this summer.

Casey Tolan is a National News Reporter for Fusion based in New York City.