Colorado Cops Seen Laughing at Violent Arrest Video of Woman With Dementia

Body-cam footage of the violent arrest of a 73-year-old woman with dementia is receiving renewed attention this week after an extended video was made public showing officers watching and laughing the recording.

As highlighted by the Daily Beast’s Jamie Ross on Monday, the hour-long surveillance video shows the two officers from the Loveland Police Department in Colorado—previously identified by the Denver Post as Austin Hopp and Daria Jalali—making jokes while watching footage of the arrest. While the officers watched the footage, the woman—identified as Karen Garner, who was injured after being tackled during the arrest—waited in a cell for hours.

At one point in the clip, roughly around 48 minutes in, Hopp asks other officers if they’re “ready for the pop,” which is an apparent reference to the noise made when the woman’s shoulder was injured. Elsewhere, both Hopp and Jalali make jokes, including one about body-cam footage being a “favorite thing” to watch, while another officer jokes about turning body-cam footage into a TV show.

“This is utterly disgusting,” Garner’s attorney, Sarah Schielke of the Life and Liberty Law Office, said when sharing the surveillance clip on Monday. “These videos cannot be unseen or unheard. I am sorry to have to share them with the public. This will be traumatic and deeply upsetting for everyone to see. But as it often goes with bad police departments, it seems this is the only way to make them change. They have to be exposed. If I didn’t release this, the Loveland Police’s toxic culture of arrogance and entitlement, along with their horrific abuse of the vulnerable and powerless, would carry on, business as usual. I won’t be a part of that.”