The footage begins with a police officer driving up to the intersection where Mr. Nichols’s car had been boxed in by two unmarked police vehicles.
The officer jumps out with his firearm drawn and joins a pair of officers rushing toward the front seat.
One officer pulls Mr. Nichols out of his car, and all three officers immediately start screaming “On the ground!”
These are the first orders in the bombardment of confusing commands that confound Mr. Nichols and prompt a cascade of retribution.
Mr. Nichols points out that he is sitting on the ground, as the officers instructed him to do.
But multiple officers shout the same command over and over with intensifying frustration and physical threats.
“Get on the ground!” one orders. “I’m gonna tase your ass.”
It eventually becomes evident that the officers would like Mr. Nichols not only on the ground but also lying down.
When Mr. Nichols repositions himself, it appears to further antagonize the officers. He tries to convey that he poses no threat.
“You guys are really doing a lot right now,” he says. “I’m just trying to go home.”
With officers pinning down his arms, pressing a taser against his leg and barking intensifying verbal threats, Mr. Nichols explodes: “I am on the ground!”
Finally, one of the officers yells more specific instructions: “On your stomach.”
Three seconds later, one of the officers shoots pepper spray into Mr. Nichols’s face.
[snip]
Then a third officer runs up with a can of pepper spray.
“You’re about to get sprayed good,” he says. The others start punching Mr. Nichols’s face.
Mr. Nichols responds by pulling his hands back to protect himself. The punching intensifies, and the pepper spray is fired.
Wiping the pepper spray from his eyes, Mr. Nichols tries assuring them that he is going to comply.
“OK,” he says. “All right. All right.”
But just as one of the officers gets hold of him, a new officer arrives and also demands that Mr. Nichols give him his hands. Again, Mr. Nichols is unable to follow the conflicting directions. He flails about, which only multiplies the police officers’ commands and the physical punishment they inflict. He is doused with pepper spray for a third time.
Two officers stand above Mr. Nichols, who is lying on his side and rubbing his eyes after being pepper-sprayed three times. An officer kicks Mr. Nichols in the face. Mr. Nichols appears to be barely conscious or coherent, but officers treat him as if he is resisting orders.
“Lay flat, goddamn it,” one officer commands.
Mr. Nichols moans and writhes on the ground. By this point, he has been tased, kicked in the head twice and punched and pepper-sprayed repeatedly.
“Lay flat,” another officer shouts.
Mr. Nichols is lying limp as an officer, without any apparent difficulty, snaps a pair of handcuffs to one of his wrists.
Officers continue to issue commands while simultaneously constraining, controlling and beating Mr. Nichols in ways that render it physically impossible for him to follow those commands.
One officer uses Mr. Nichols’s handcuffed arm to pull his body from the ground and into a kneeling position. Then another officer strikes him with a baton three times, yelling “Give us your hands!”
Surrounded by four officers, he tries to move away from the baton.
“Give me your fucking hands!” one officer shouts.
But Mr. Nichols — with one officer pinning his arms behind his back, another gripping his handcuffed wrist and a third punching his face — cannot comply.
Mr. Nichols doubles over and calls out for his mother. The blows continue.
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