Shocking video footage shows a Michigan cop punching a teenager in the face while booking him onto a suburban Detroit jail — then grabbing him by the hair and slamming his face into the floor.
Warren police released the surveillance footage Tuesday while announcing that Officer Matthew Rodriguez, 48, had been suspended and charged with assault and willful neglect of duty, both misdemeanors.
Police Commissioner William Dwyer called it “sad and upsetting to every member of this department.”
“This is not what we do. This is not who we are,” he said, while praising two other officers for quickly reporting the disturbing attack.
The footage shows Rodriguez, a 14-year veteran of the force, at around 6 a.m. on Tuesday last week as he processed a 19-year-old carjacking suspect who’d been arrested for multiple felonies.
As the officer stands and goes toward a printer in his office, he appears to exchange words with the suspect, although the video has no audio.
The much bigger cop then suddenly swings his outstretched right hand to smack the suspect in the face, sending him wheeling into the wall.
Rodriguez pounces on him, picking him up horizontally by his pants and near his neck to throw him down on the floor, knocking over a computer monitor on the desk.
Two other officers rush in, with one helping to pin the suspect to the floor as Rodriguez straddles him in back mount and unleashes the first of two further punches to the head.
Rodriguez then appears to grab the pinned teen by his dreadlocks to slam his face into the ground, continuing to press down on him as he exchanges words.
He then picks up the suspect by the hair and drags him out, marching him to a cell — where he then throws him in, according to the footage.
The booked teen — identified by the Detroit Free Press as Jaquwan Smith — was evaluated at a hospital despite not requesting medical attention, the police chief said.
The carjacking suspect also did not lodge a complaint about the beating.
However, the two other officers seen in the footage reported the attack about an hour later, sparking an immediate investigation with Rodriguez placed on leave within hours.
Although the footage does not show the officers stopping the attack, their chief claimed one repeatedly told Rodriguez: “That’s enough! That’s enough!”
“What these officers did is by no means easy,” Dwyer said of reporting their superior, whom he also accused of failing to switch on his bodycam in defiance of department policy.
“If it were not for the reporting and review of this incident, we may have never known about it.”
Rodriguez was charged with willful neglect of duty and assault, both misdemeanors. He was released on a $5,000 personal bond at his arraignment Tuesday, with a pretrial set for July 13.
His attorney at the hearing, Peter Sudnick, told the Free Press he was only repping the cop for the arraignment and declined to comment.
The police chief also declined to discuss Rodriguez’s disciplinary record, citing an employment hearing set for Friday.
Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said the incident “gives a black eye to the ones that put the badge on … to serve and protect.
“That’s no way to serve, nor protect,” he said of the caught-on-camera attack.
With Post wires
