After being compelled by court order, Durango High School officials in Las Vegas “have released police reports and body camera footage under court order showing a campus officer kneeling on a Black student last year,” NBC News reports.
Per the incident report, Lt. Jason Elfberg with the Clark County School District police, the Black teen whose name has been redacted, “refused to move away from officers handcuffing another student while investigating a report” from a prior incident.
Elfberg then proceeded to pin the student “beneath his knee next to a patrol vehicle.” This sparked outrage and evoked George Floyd comparisons after cell phone video of the incident became widely circulated on social media.
The previously disseminated 55-second clip shows the moments before Elfberg kneeled on him. You can hear students yelling in the background, “You can’t have him on the ground like that.” You can also hear the student, crying out for his mother, akin to George Floyd.
Of note, police never found a weapon on the scene. There were a slew of public protests and the public issued calls for Elfberg to be fired. In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada filed a lawsuit demanding school officials to make their information public.
Initially, the school district had tried to argue that the records were confidential due to the age of the detainees; however, the judge disagreed and issued an order to release the footage from Feb. 9, 2023. They finally complied last Thursday.
But one year later, Elfberg is still an employee of the police force at the school and the district has cleared him of any wrongdoing, said Adam Levine, Elfberg’s attorney.
On Friday, the ACLU said the district’s actions “shameful.” Furthermore, withholding the footage and saying the Black teens were stopped as part of a gun investigation was merely an “attempt to spin the events and avoid accountability for attacking school children.”
Six video clips were distributed showing, “faces and parts of some other scenes blurred, total more than two hours.”
But ACLU Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said, “This fight is far from over.” Thus far, the group has spent $50,000 in legal fees trying “to obtain the records on behalf of the two…14-year-old male freshmen at the time of the confrontation.”
What you see is an officer engaged in misconduct,” Haseebullah stated, adding, “I’m not afraid to file a charge in an appropriate circumstance, if and when there is sufficient evidence.”