CMPD suspends officer for striking woman 17 times during Steele Creek bus stop arrest

A Charlotte police officer hit Christina Pierre 17 times during a controversial November arrest at a Steele Creek area bus stop.

It was 14 times too many, CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings said in a news conference after body camera footage was released Tuesday.

Vincent Pistone, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officer who hit Pierre in a slew of “compliance strikes” outside a Steele Creek Bojangles, will be suspended for 40 hours following an internal affairs investigation, officials said Tuesday afternoon.

The Nov. 13 arrest came minutes after police patrolling South Tryon Street said they smelled marijuana as they drove by a bus stop. Pierre and Anthony Lee sat at the city bus stop outside Bojangles, video shows. The couple had just gotten off work, they told police. They were charged with a series of crimes, including possession of marijuana and possessing a concealed weapon, but all charges were dismissed.

“It smells like you’re smoking weed,” an officer told them as he approached from behind. Pointing across the street, both Pierre and Lee said they bought the THC-A cigarette at a smoke shop.

“Alright, do me a favor then,” an officer says to Lee. “Put your hand behind your back.”

Pierre yelled at the officers. ““Woah, woah, woah, what are you doing?” she asked as the arrest escalated.

Nearly six hours of body camera footage released Tuesday morning offered new insight into the viral, forceful arrest. After struggling with police, Pierre — surrounded and pinned by at least four officers — was struck by Pistone. Police held the news conference about Pistone’s suspension hours after the video release. He is the only officer CMPD has named in the incident.

“Fourteen strikes to the female’s leg came after her hands were behind her back,” Jennings wrote in a statement. “These strikes were not deemed justified. After three leg strikes, the officer should have made an assessment to determine next steps before continuing strikes.”

Six other officers involved in the arrest were exonerated in CMPD’s independent Internal Affairs Board’s investigation, Jennings said. Those officers haven’t been named.

What the videos show

At about 2 p.m. on Nov. 13, two officers walked from the Bojangles parking lot on South Tryon Street to the bus station in Charlotte’s Steele Creek area.

“Sup guys, y’all just hanging out?” one of two officers asks as they approach Lee and Pierre, who had just finished their shift at Bojangles. Lee later told police Pierre was his fiancé.

Lee asks what the pair did wrong.

“Well, it smells like you’re smoking weed,” an officer tells them.

Within minutes, the officer moves to detain Lee and asks Lee to do him “a favor”: put his hands behind his back. Pierre immediately tries to interfere, said CMPD Lt. Kevin Pietrus in a Tuesday video.

A chaotic struggle between the couple and police ensues. Lee repeatedly asks why the officer is trying to arrest him.

“I have rights! You’re supposed to be a peacemaker! You’re not even following the law!” Lee says.

Meanwhile, Pierre lunges back toward the bench while another officer attempts to keep her away to “deescalate” the situation.

Police say she assaulted the officer. In body-worn camera footage, the officer later tells another officer “she punched me in the face, so I struck her back.”

Bystander video and police footage show the officer punching Pierre in the face and missing a second attempted strike after she swung at him. Then, she’s pinned to the ground and at least four officers called for back-up surround her.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about that,” Jennings said Tuesday about the punch to the face. “But the officer did withstand two punches to his face prior to retaliating and striking Ms. Pierre, so that was a justified use of force at that point.”

Pictures of Pierre’s face that showed bruising circulated online in the days after the arrest.

Belly-down, with her hands pinned underneath her, Pierre is struck by Pistone 17 times. He justifiably targeted her leg, police later said, but he hit her 14 times too many. On strike three, her hands are behind her back.

Lee and Pistone were detained by the time a small crowd started gathering.

“I don’t know why he punched her,” one woman says to an officer in body camera video. “He was beating — just beating — as hard as he could. I’m sorry, she might have been resisting, but she didn’t deserve that.”

At the police car, an officer starts a conversation with Lee.

“Man, it didn’t have to be like that,” an officer says. “We gave you a lawful command, why didn’t you just follow?”

“Because you’re not letting me speak,” Lee says. “I did not fight.”

“Man, you did fight,” the officer interrupts.

CMPD says Lee did not cooperate and resisted arrest.

Chief defends arrests over marijuana

In an op-ed published by The Charlotte Observer and in Tuesday’s news conference, Jennings defended officers’ attempts to detain Lee and Pierre over suspected marijuana.

“As long as marijuana is illegal, I will expect my officers to address open marijuana use and marijuana sales,” Jennings said.

“While most interactions involving marijuana do not result in an arrest, an individual’s actions can ultimately determine the outcome,” Jennings wrote in the op-ed.

If the community doesn’t want people to be arrested over marijuana, legalize it, he said.

Pierre and Lee both insist that they are using THC-A, not marijuana, throughout the body cam footage released Tuesday. THC-A is sold widely at Charlotte-area smoke shops. When burned, THC-A turns into Delta 9 THC, which is the intoxicating element in marijuana.

The officers dismissed their claims before the struggle started.

Jennings said Tuesday that “the substance they were in possession of was certainly illegal marijuana.”

It was at a level higher than any legal hemp or THC products, Jennings said.

‘Zero repercussions’

Police charged Pierre with assault on a government official, resisting arrest and simple possession of marijuana. They charged Lee with carrying a concealed firearm, resisting arrest and simple possession of marijuana. The District Attorney’s Office later dropped the charges — something Jennings said he was disappointed about.

“To allow for somebody to punch an officer in the face and have absolute zero repercussions in the legal system, except for the initial arrest, is an insult to our officers,” Jennings said during a news conference Tuesday. “We can’t live in a society where we allow people to assault officers. If we do that, it’s going to be a society I don’t think we’ll want to live in.”

Body camera fell off

Community activist Meko McCarthy’s concerns lie mostly with why officers first initiated the arrest and why one of the body-worn cameras fell to the ground. That camera’s footage, which was released by police, includes audio, but is pointed straight up.

”Cameras don’t just come off,” McCarthy said. “It’s a repeated pattern they’ve allowed to occur.”

McCarthy’s membership in the citizens’ input group organized by Mayor Vi Lyles will likely bring her into the group of leaders CMPD will ask to review police policies, she said.

The community needs more transparency, she said.

Police released the footage, she said, only because they want to maintain control of the narrative. Had the bystander video not gone viral or the media not gotten a hold of it, she doubts they would have said a thing. And had officers not used an unnecessary amount of force in the first place, she said, they wouldn’t have needed to release anything.

”They like to be movie directors,” she said.

Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP, took issue with CMPD’s release of a “critical incident briefing.”

That briefing showed snippets from Pierre’s and Lee’s arrests, with Pietrus from CMPD’s public affairs office giving commentary.

“We don’t need the people who are being investigated to narrate the video,” she said.

Policy discussions won’t be public

Mack will be one community member who joins discussions about the department’s policies as part of the new community board announced by CMPD.

“My priority is ensuring that the people of Mecklenburg are safe,” Mack said. “Quite frankly, Black people don’t feel safe when we interact with the police. We just don’t. I’m hoping that we can change that — hundreds of years of history of harm being done.”

But those meetings won’t be open to the public, Jennings told The Observer Tuesday.

“I want these group discussions to be exactly open and free,” he said. If members of the group found their comments being publicized, they might feel less free to have those discussions, Jennings said.

The Observer wrote a letter to Jennings and other city officials last week, arguing that state law requires the meetings to be public.

“At the end of the day, we will certainly share what the outcome of that group is going to be,” he said. “But, certainly don’t want that to be public.”

Lawsuit

Pierre and Lee plan to sue the city, their lawyer, Lauren Newton, has said.

“My clients’ main goal is to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else again,” she said. “This is clearly excessive force.”

What needs to be looked at: excessive force and the policy on response-to-resistance.

While Pierre and Lee were charged with resisting, the detention itself was illegal, she said.