Update: Metro Transit Police has initiated a use of force investigation into this arrest.

Original: A video has surfaced on social media showing a Metro Transit Police officer kicking a young black woman to the ground at Columbia Heights Metro station yesterday. The incident took place around 6:35 p.m., according to Metro.

April Goggans of Black Lives Matter DC posted the video on Youtube (though she did not film it). Goggans writes that the girl is 17 years old and was traveling with her friends from Bell High School. Police say the girl is 18.

According to Goggans, the young woman walked through the station’s gates with a bag of chips and a lollipop. A transit cop stopped her for having the prohibited items, Goggans writes, adding that she received this backstory from the unnamed teenager and her friends.

Metro’s account confirms that an officer told the girl to put her bag of chips away while she was on the paid side of the fare gates. Police say that the girl responded with “a defiant ‘No!” Officers said they told the girl that she’d have to leave the station if she did not comply, and she replied “No! I’m not going anywhere!” Police said they ordered her two more times to put the chips away, she refused, and an officer reached for her wrist to handcuff her as she resisted.

When the video begins, officers are instructing the handcuffed teen to sit down. When she doesn’t, one officer grabs her arm and kicks her leg causing the girl to fall to the ground. “Oh my God!” someone screams in the background. The officer proceeds to nudge her shoulder and the girl screams “don’t touch me!”

“Have a good day folks!” the officer said to passersby, also instructing them to catch their trains or leave the station. And as another officer searches her bag, the girl screams that the handcuffs are too tight.

“The young woman in handcuffs was also experiencing a lot of emotional trauma because her friend got shot and died yesterday,” according to Goggans.

As a crowd gathers, a woman tells the officers that they should have just taken the lollipop from “the little girl” without touching her or causing a scene. Another officer tells the woman that he asked the girl for the items, but “she refused and told me she wasn’t going to give it and that’s why she’s under arrest.” Now, the officer said, “she goes to juvenile detention and her mom comes to pick her up—that’s how it works.”

Goggan also writes that other videos of this interaction show police taking the girl to a police vehicle to be searched, “but they slammed her against the car.” Additionally, she said, a criminal defense attorney at Georgetown Law “was filming from the start and is going to follow up.”

Officers arrested the teen for unlawful entry and took her to MPD’s 5th District station, according to Metro.

Filed Under: columbia heights metro, metro transit police, police brutality, video,