Joseph Harris: Arkansas police officer fired after video shows him beating inmate in back seat of patrol car

CNN
—

The Jonesboro Police Department in the US state of Arkansas has fired an officer after a video showed him physically attacking an inmate in the back seat of a patrol car.

On Friday, the department was “notified of a complaint regarding an incident involving a JPD officer that occurred the previous evening,” the department said in a post on Facebook.

“The severity of the complaint required immediate action. Following an internal review of the incident, it was decided that the officer involved, Joseph Harris, should be terminated with immediate effect,” the police station said.

The department said it was “resolving this incident as quickly as possible” and posted a video of the incident on its YouTube channel.

In the video, the arrested man is seen sitting handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, wearing a hospital gown. He appears to be out of breath and panicking.

He is heard telling police officers that he had swallowed a packet of fentanyl the day before and was afraid he would die if he was not taken back to the hospital.

“I swear to God, on my daughter’s life, I have fucking fentanyl in me and they’re trying to send me back to prison where they’ll let me fucking die,” he says.

The man appears to be getting agitated, as he repeatedly tells the police that he has fentanyl in him and at one point asks: “Are you trying to kill me?”

An officer is heard answering: “No.”

When the inmate asks the police officers if they mind or if they believe him, one officer is heard saying, “Not really, no.”

Then you see the man with the seatbelt around his neck trying to strangle himself in the moving vehicle.

The car stops and a police officer opens the door and begins repeatedly punching and elbowing the man in the head before unbuckling the seatbelt around the man’s neck. and slammed the door in his face.

When another officer asks him twice if everything is OK, the inmate in the video initially does not react.

Jonesboro Police Chief Rick Elliott told CNN affiliate KAIT that he had communicated with the FBI, which led to the FBI’s Little Rock field office opening a case. Elliott also forwarded information about the incident to the Greene County District Attorney, he told the station.

CNN has contacted the Greene County District Attorney’s Office for comment.

Harris was suspended from the police force for 20 hours without pay and training about two years ago for excessive use of force, Jonesboro Police Department spokeswoman Sally Smith told CNN. He was also named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in June, Smith confirmed.

CNN has attempted to reach Harris and asked the police union for comment, but has not yet received a response.

The firing came amid renewed scrutiny of how departments respond to officer misconduct following the release of bodycam footage showing the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old black woman in Illinois who called 911 and was killed by a police officer in her own home.

The deputy, Sean Grayson, was fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office and has pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder charge. However, Massey’s family questions how Grayson was hired in the first place given his troubled employment history.

At a town hall forum in Jonesboro held by the local NAACP chapter on Monday, Elliott assured the crowd that he had taken steps to ensure Harris would not work as a police officer anywhere again, KAIT reported.

“There is a nationwide license revocation, so if his license is revoked in Arkansas, it will apply to the entire United States,” the police chief said, according to the newspaper.

Elliott also acknowledged that public trust had been broken and the entire police department must work to rebuild it, the partner said.

CNN’s Ray Sanchez contributed to this report.