Family Questions Chokehold Used in Unitedville Arrest

A police arrest in Unitedville on Friday is raising questions from the family of the man who was detained. Officers went to a home in the community to take Samuel Parham into custody. A video that has been shared widely online shows Parham resisting arrest. During the struggle, one of the officers puts him in a chokehold and takes him to the ground, and Parham appears to pass out for a moment. A relative says she then convinced him to stop resisting and go with the officers. The family is now asking whether the chokehold was legal. We spoke with Nikkita Perez her by phone.

 

On the Phone: Nikkita Perez, Relative

“He told me, he said, ‘Cousin, I am tired of these police. Every time these police see me, they want to attack me and beat me up. Anywhere I am at and police see me, police want to beat me up, they want to arrest me and take me for forty-eight hours, and nobody tells me what they are taking me for.’ I told him, ‘Samuel, I know you are tired, but sometimes you just have to cooperate, and maybe eventually when they see you cooperating they will stop.”

 

Reporter

“What does the family think about the officer putting him in a chokehold?”

 

Nikkita Perez

“That is something that raises a big concern with us, because we want to know if that is legal in Belize. We want to know if it is something they were trained to do in the Police Academy. We want to know if that is a protocol they are following. These small children, when they see these police vehicles and these things happening, it puts a fright in them. They are afraid. So what will happen when these children grow up and see a police? They will want to run, because they will say, ‘I don’t want anybody to beat me up like how they beat up that one.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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