Body camera footage to be released; lawsuit filed by Fayetteville woman who says cops wrongly detained her
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Shortly after a Cumberland County judge ruled Tuesday that body camera footage be released in a case involving a woman who claims she was wrongly detained by police last month, the woman announced she has filed a lawsuit against the city, Fayetteville Police department, officers and police chief.Ja'Lana Dunlap-Banks, 22, a property manager for AVA Real Estate, says she was unconstitutionally detained and handcuffed by two Fayetteville police officers Sept. 6 while checking on a property in north Fayetteville.
Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the city of Fayetteville, the Fayetteville Police Department, Fayetteville Police Chief Gina Hawkins, Officer Ryan Haddock, Detective Amanda Bell and "John and Jane Doe's 1-100," Harry Daniels, one of Dunlap-Banks' lawyers and a prominent civil rights attorney, said during a news conference outside of the Federal Courthouse in Fayetteville on Tuesday. Daniels said the John and Jane Doe defendants are stand-ins for the police officers who were at the scene but have yet to be identified by Dunlap-Banks' legal team.
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"We are here seeking justice on behalf of Ms. Dunlap," Daniels said. "What happened to her should not happen."
The lawsuit alleges Dunlap-Banks' First, Fourth and 14th amendment rights were violated and claims the officers' actions that day constituted false imprisonment and assault and battery. Additionally, the suit alleges negligence on the officers' parts and says Dunlap-Banks faced "severe emotional distress" as a result.
"Ms. Dunlap has suffered significantly in this matter," Daniels said. "I firmly believe that if she was a different color, this would never have happened."
According to the lawsuit, Dunlap-Banks, who has sickle cell anemia, began to hyperventilate during her interaction with the officers and vomited on herself. Daniels said Dunlap-Banks had to resign from her position after the incident, as her job as a property manager required her to go to private properties and she feared a similar incident would occur.
The news conference came shortly after a Cumberland County Judge Jim Ammons ruled that video taken by police body cameras be released.
The Fayetteville Police Department and Dunlap-Banks filed motions petitioning the court for the release of the footage. In North Carolina, body camera footage can only be released by order of the court.
"I think the interest for both of us is to publicly release," Michael Rose Whyte, an attorney for the Fayetteville Police Department, said during the brief hearing.
Daniels said he expects Dunlap-Banks and her team would be able to view the footage later Tuesday.
During the news conference, Daniels called for Hawkins and the Fayetteville Police Department to further publicly address the matter.
In an Oct. 11 news release, issued by the Fayetteville Police Department after cellphone video Dunlap Banks filmed of the incident was shared on social media, Hawkins said that the department's Internal Affairs Unit was expediting an investigation into the matter and that she would be filing a motion with the courts for release of the body camera footage. Hawkins said the encounter with Dunlap-Banks occurred half a mile from a location where a potentially violent person had fled police.
"What is she going to do to these officers?" Daniels said. "Is she going to slap them on the wrist and put them back on the wrist until something else happens? If you don't address it now, the next press conference we're going to have, it's going to be a press conference for something these officers have done (while) armed to somebody till they're not standing here to have a discussion."
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Dunlap-Banks said she filed the lawsuit to seek justice for herself and others in her position.
"I really just want to speak up for people who can't speak up for themselves," she said. "Also, for the people who things happen like this to them and they don't say anything to nobody and they don't tell anybody, I just want to make it clear that you have to speak up for yourself. You have to demand respect, whether they wear a badge or whether they're just regular folks.
"If you're wearing that badge, if you're wearing a uniform, then you're supposed to protect and serve, not harm innocent people."
Dunlap-Banks' attorney Xavier de Janon said Fayetteville police officers have a long history of attacking innocent Black and Brown people, and this lawsuit is intended to seek justice for those residents, too. De Janon referenced several Fayetteville residents who died or were injured in alleged police brutality cases, including Jada Johnson, 22, who was shot and killed by police in July, and Justin Livesay, 40, who was fatally shot by police in September.
"This is not an issue of a couple bad apples, because we're seeing that the tree is rotten," de Janon said. "We're seeing that the roots are rotten. So when we demand justice for Miss Ja'Lana, we demand justice for these people, too, and for the other Black and Brown people of Fayetteville who might suffer when they meet the police, again and again and again."
Daniels, by phone Tuesday, challenged the Fayetteville Police Department's claim that the officers involved were looking for a violent suspect who had last been seen half a mile away from the property. He said his team obtained police radio traffic implying there were no potentially violent suspects nearby.
"The only person they was looking for was 20 miles away," he said.
More:Woman says Fayetteville cops wrongly handcuffed her and took her ID; now she plans to sue
Sgt. Alpha Caldwell, a spokesperson for the Fayetteville Police Department, said Tuesday she did not know when the footage would be publicly released.
Public safety reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Judge orders body cam footage released in Ja'Lana Dunlap-Banks case
