Floyd Dent is African American, while the two officers involved in the incident are white. The confrontation happened in January.
A dashcam video obtained by a local television station shows Dent being pulled over by the two police officers, and when Dent opened his door, one of the officers pulled his gun and aimed it directly at him. The officers dragged Dent out of the vehicle, threw him face down on the ground and placed him in a chokehold.
"I’m lucky to be living. I think they were trying to kill me, especially when they had choked me," Dent told WDIV-TV. "I mean, I was on my last breath. I kept telling the officer, ‘Please I can’t breathe.'" The video also shows that other officers arrived and tried to handcuff him, and that another officer is hitting him repeatedly in the face and upper body. One officer used a stun gun several times. In total, six patrol cars responded.
Police say they pulled Dent over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign and they followed his car down the street. Dent says he wasn’t trying to speed away and didn’t immediately stop until the police lights came on.
"I looked and said, ‘Wow, are they stopping me?’" Dent said. "So I just kept going until I realized that they were really stopping me."
"The next thing I know, the officer runs up to me with his gun, you know, talking about blowing my head off," Dent continued. "Then he grabbed me out of the car and started beating on me, you know. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Dent was unarmed and had no criminal record.
One of the officers said he placed Dent in a chokehold because he feared for his life and that Dent had bitten him and tried to resist arrest, but there is no evidence of the alleged bite marks and the officer did not later seek medical assistance.
Police initially charged him with assault, resisting arrest, and possession of cocaine, claiming they found cocaine underneath the passenger seat of his car. Dent contends police planted the drugs at the time of his arrest.
An Inkster district court judge reviewed the tape and tossed the assault and resisting charges, but Dent faces an April 1 hearing on the drug charge.
Dent’s attorney says that there’s a portion of the tape that hasn’t been released publicly that shows police planting the drugs.
Dent has filed a lawsuit against the police and the city of Inkster, seeking unspecified damages.
