Kentucky State Police respond to viral TikTok video showing restraint of man
The Kentucky State Police responded this week to a TikTok video that showed a state trooper watching as two men restrain a man in a parking lot in Hazard. The man being restrained was Black, while those restraining him were white.
On Tuesday, state police indicated that the June 21 incident involved the man’s caregivers, who were trying to keep him from hurting himself or others.
At the beginning of the video, one shirtless man can be seen straddling the man lying prone on the ground. Another man had his upper body across the man who was being restrained. The restrained man can be heard yelling as they put his arm behind his back while a state trooper looks on.
The video was shared early Tuesday by a TikTok user whose account name is the_savage_lokius. The user who posted the video asked viewers to “help us find out what’s going on” and shared a phone number for police in Hazard.
State police Commissioner Phillip Burnett Jr. said in a statement that the trooper was responding “to assist with a situation” in the parking lot.
“The trooper spoke with the individual’s caregivers and took appropriate action to de-escalate the situation by utilizing Crisis Intervention Training, a program developed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, that allowed the caregivers to use their training to prevent the individual from harming himself or others,” Burnett said in the statement. “EMS responded to the scene and transported the individual to the hospital where he was treated and released.”
The original video had been viewed more than 132,000 times by Tuesday night.
In another video posted later Tuesday, the TikTok user shared a news report that included the state police’s statement. He asked people who work as caregivers in assisted living settings to share their “professional opinion” about what is going on in the video.
“We were trying to find context,” he said of sharing the video earlier Tuesday. “Now we have it, and now we can decide if, in context, those actions in that video were justified.”
This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 7:25 AM.
