Tuesday October 6, 2015
By By John Reinan
A photo grab from the video posted on Twitter. @MKBANDZZ – TWITTER
Somali community leaders will meet Tuesday with Richfield police to discuss a video that appears to show a Richfield officer striking a young Somali man after a traffic stop.
“We support the police,” said Omar Jamal, head of the Somali Human Rights Commission. “There are very good police officers on the street. But one of them crossed a line. And there have to be some policies and procedures to remedy the situation.”
Richfield police on Monday issued a statement saying the department is investigating the incident, which occurred about 6:30 p.m. Saturday near Adams Hill Park. Police received a phone call about a “suspicious person,” and a vehicle was stopped. The police statement acknowledged that the department was aware of a video of the encounter but said nothing further about the video.
In the video, posted on Twitter, an officer shouts at a young man identified by Jamal as 19-year-old Kamal Gelle. The officer shoves Gelle and says loudly, “Now move when I tell you to!” Gelle doesn’t comply, and the officer shouts, “We’re working right here, so [expletive] move!” The officer then smacks Gelle in the back of the head with an open palm and gives him another shove as the video ends.
Jamal said the entire seven-member board of the Somali commission will meet Tuesday morning with Mike Koob, Richfield’s deputy director of public safety, to discuss the incident.
“The Somali Human Rights Commission is calling for this to stop,” Jamal said. “This undermines a long relationship that everybody was working on.”