BART Promises Investigation Of Second Officer's Punch (videos still coming to light)

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://www.ktvu.com/news/18554361/detail.html#-

BART Promises Investigation Of Second Officer's Punch

Friday, January 23, 2009 – updated: 11:34 am PST January 26, 2009
OAKLAND, Calif. -- An angry BART general manager has pledged a “rigorous investigation” of a second officer’s actions on the night Oscar Grant III was fatally slain by former transit police officer Johannes Mehserle.

BART General Manager Dorothy Dugger was responding to a videotape aired by KTVU that shows a second officer striking one of the men detained on the transit station platform early on January 1st.

“I take this new allegation of police use of unreasonable force extremely seriously,” Dugger said in a prepared statement released Saturday night. “I have directed (BART) Police Chief Gary Gee to conduct a rigorous internal affairs investigation into this officer’s actions.”

The video shows a BART police officer leaving one suspect on the ground and walking over to an area where a female officer is talking to three other men. The officer, named Tony Pirone according to the San Francisco Chronicle, then appears to punch one of the men in the face.

"That was quite a shot," says Peter Keane a law professor with University of California Hastings College of Law. "That's a pretty brutal punch, knocks his head back, sends him to the ground."

After the punch, Grant can be seen putting his hands up. The two men flanking Grant sit down as the same officer appears to point a taser at them. The video then stops. Two officers arrive and that is when Mehserle allegedly shot Oscar Grant in the back, killing him. Mehserle now faces a murder charge.

Video of punch: http://www.ktvu.com/video/18554358/index.html