New bodycam footage of the Miami-Dade police officer who was suspended last week for his actions during the arrest of Dyma Loving, a woman who claimed a man pointed a shotgun at her, shows that the officer reacted inappropriately by violently arresting her.
The video confirms that Loving never threatened police officer Alejandro Giraldo. Instead, she spoke clearly and only became frustrated after he kept asking her the same questions. The footage also backs another video taken by a friend of Loving’s, Adrianna Green, that went viral on social media.
Loving and Green said they called police earlier this month after Green’s neighbor Frank Tumm pointed a shotgun at them as they walked by his house. A small altercation between the two had started when Tumm called the two ladies “hookers.”
At one point in the bodycam video, Loving asks why she’s being questioned. Giraldo then takes out his handcuffs and three officers push Loving into a chain-link fence before she’s pulled to the ground, handcuffed and taken into custody. Loving was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest without violence.
Loving admitted that after being questioned as if she was a suspect, she became angry and began to yell, especially since they wouldn’t let her contact her children.
“It was Officer Giraldo that did everything to me. I asked him if he could walk me down to Adrienne’s house so that I can put my phone on the charger so I could call my kids. And the first thing he tells me was ‘no,’ I was just going to stand there and wait. I mean, at first, I took offense to it. But I didn’t say anything or react,” Loving told ESSENCE.
“I just waited. I gave him my statement. And the whole time I’m giving him my statement, he’s acting really ignorant towards me and Adrienne. He asked us, ‘Well why did you guys do this?’ And we were like, ‘What do you mean? We didn’t do anything. We didn’t even start this. We were just minding our own business,’” she continued.
Giraldo was suspended last week by his department’s Police Director Juan Perez after the cellphone video starting circulating on social media.
Police also only arrested Tumm this week just before body cam footage was about to be released. He had initially denied the incident or that he had even owned a gun.
Loving told the Miami Herald that she believed Tumm’s arrest happened only because because police saw that cell phone video of the incident had surfaced.
“I’ve been crying and sad ever since, like every day. I’ve had to take off work because my body is physically in pain. My elbow is scratched up and really nasty. My forearm is nasty. It’s swollen. I went to the hospital for my neck and my back because I thought he had crushed my throat. I couldn’t talk for three days because my throat was so sore. I can’t even pick up my one-year-old daughter because my arm and my back hurt so bad,” she told ESSENCE.
Loving plans on filing a lawsuit against the officer and the Miami-Dade police department, and has hired civil rights attorney Justin Moore.
