In a viral video posted to Facebook Saturday, some Washington, D.C., police officers can be seen frisking three young Black boys.
The video was filmed by D.C. resident Ariel Gory, who wrote she saw the encounter from a window in her house after returning home from a jog. The youngest boy was 9, according to Gory; the oldest was 12.
"I watched three police officers on bikes stop three little Black boys and push them onto my neighbors’ front yard," Gory wrote in her Facebook post. "An officer yelled, 'Do you have a knife? Do you have a knife?' and that’s when I grabbed my phone and stepped out onto my front porch into the cold to record immediately."
Gory told Hill Rag she felt compelled to act because "the faces of unarmed Black men, women and children who have been involved in situations like these and have ended up in jail, injured or dead came to my mind.”
WUSA9 reports the three officers arrived on the scene after an elderly man called 911, complaining the boys had threatened him with a knife.
Gory told the station the boys presented an opposing version of events. “The boys — from what I was hearing — were saying that that’s not how the story went and that actually the man was threatening to hurt them.”
She elaborated on Facebook, writing the officers listened to the boys then decided "this must have just been a little conflict or misunderstanding and [said] that they’ll all go back down to the CVS together and apologize to the man."
One of the officers noticed Gory filming and told her she was welcome to follow them, which she wrote she did. En route to deliver the apology, the other officers seen in Gory's later clips arrived.
"They barely walk past two houses before a police car pulls up and a female officer comes out, stopping them right in front of Fragers Hardware Store," Gory wrote.
As more officers report to the scene, the interrogation reportedly begins all over again.
"The female officer asks, … 'Any of these kids have weapons on them?' Since the officers had not patted the boys down yet, they prepare for a pat-down," Gory wrote. "Meanwhile two additional officers ride up on bikes."
In the third of Gory's three clips, seven police officers surround the three visibly upset boys. The officers pat the children down, find nothing and continue their questioning. Gory said they were finally released to their parents after an hour of questions and searches.
“As a woman of color, an educator and simply a member of this community, I felt a responsibility to these little boys to make sure that whatever happened, good or bad, their story would be told," Gory said in her statement to Hill Rag. "I also hoped that in seeing me recording, the officers would be even just a tad more careful about the decisions they made at that time.”
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