A newly released video shows a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy throwing a transgender man to the ground during a traffic stop.
Emmett Brock was driving home from his teaching job Feb. 10, 2023, when he saw a deputy “berating” a woman, so he flipped him off, and he said the law enforcement officer then started following him, and the LASD report shows the deputy pulled him over after spotting an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror, reported KTTV-TV. “Hi, um, I’m being followed by a police car,” Brock told a 911 dispatcher, saying he felt uneasy that the deputy was following him.
Deputy Joseph Benza stopped him in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, and surveillance video shows he used his cruiser to pin Brock’s vehicle into a spot and threw him to the ground within 20 seconds into their interaction and punched him in the head multiple times. READ MORE: Trump target letter opens door to charging a ‘full range of one or more conspiracies’: legal expert “He must’ve punched him eight to 10 times in the head, maliciously,” said Brock’s attorney Thomas Beck. “There was no reason for the contact.
It was purely retaliatory.” Benza placed Brock in his cruiser, and he was booked on charges of mayhem, causing serious injury to a deputy, resisting arrest and failing to obey a lawful order. “This deputy is a thin-skinned thug and what he did to this man on tape proves it,” Beck said.