JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A video circulating on social media shows the moments when an officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was attacked while responding to a call in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which confirmed the legitimacy of the video, said the incident happened Thursday around 11 p.m. in the 700 block of Edison Avenue.
According to JSO, an officer working in Riverside was told there was a shooting at a nearby bar. JSO said the officer got his AR-15 from his cruiser to investigate, and that’s when he was surrounded.
The video that shows the incident, posted by Duval Promo on Twitter, starts with the officer getting into a pushing match with a man in a red shirt who appears to be part of a fight with other people. He then pulls the man away and goes towards a woman wearing a white top and blue jean shorts.
Then the camera phone then angles down.
Seconds later, you can see the officer attempting to grab the woman in the white top and blue jean shorts but she and the man in the red shirt are putting up a fight. They start wrestling before the officer goes to the ground.
The woman he was struggling with gets on top of him and starts throwing blows, video shows, while the man in the red shirt is trying to pull her off.
The officer eventually gets up then the video shows more people around them before the camera phone points in a different direction.
JSO said the officer may have been set up, but News4Jax crime and safety expert Ken Jefferson said there are a lot of unanswered questions about the events leading up to the video.
“I don’t know what he was responding to cause him to grab an AR-15 and go into a crowd with it if that was the situation. There are some unanswered questions I would like to have answered,” Ken Jefferson said. “If he knows he’s going into a crowd, why would he not wait on backup to come and help him? He’s in a situation where he’s got the whole crowd against him, so he has to fight for his life, but I don’t believe it was an ambush.”
Jefferson reviewed the video several times and was asked if the officer could have used deadly force in the situation.
“Even though there is a crowd of people standing around, yelling and hollering and making all kinds of noise, I only saw one person that was really aggressive with him, so he would not have been justified in using deadly force but he could have used non-lethal force such as his taser,” he said.
Fraternal Order of Police President Steve Zona saw the same video but says he believes the officer used great restraint in not using deadly force and believes deadly force would have been justified.
“If he was in a situation where he was in fear of his life because maybe somebody was trying to grab that rifle. You can see that video and you can’t see clearly if they are trying to grab it or whatever, but he may have well be 100% justified in deploying lethal force,” Zona told News4Jax.
But as Zona said, it’s unclear if anyone was trying to take the officer’s gun while he was on the ground because it’s dark and the video was recorded from a distance. Zona and Jefferson both say the problem with this video is that it doesn’t show what happened the moment the officer arrived on the scene up until we see him in a shoving match.
JSO said one person was arrested. The charges were not immediately clear.
News4Jax has requested the arrest report to learn more details about what happened.