El Paso Police Department Under Fire After Viral Video Shows EPPD Officer Pointing Gun At Children

A video that was posted Friday night on Facebook has gone viral and has prompted an investigation within the El Paso Police Department. The video was originally posted by a user named “Aj-king Stoner” Friday night, and it shows a chaotic scene where an officer briefly pulled his gun on a group of children.

The Facebook video starts mid-way into the scene that played out in an El Paso, Texas, neighborhood. One police officer had a young man sitting down on the sidewalk, and a group of other children stood nearby as someone else videotaped the encounter. As some of the kids stepped toward the officer, he briefly pulled his gun and pointed it toward them, before quickly holstering it again.

As the El Paso Times notes, it is not clear from the video what the circumstances were that led to the chaotic incident. Sgt. Enrique Carrillo, the spokesman for the department, said that the incident is under investigation and he would not share any specific comments regarding what happened in the video.

There is a lot of profanity in the video as many of the young boys watching the situation are cursing at the officers. The moment where the officer pulls out his handgun comes as some are yelling at him and moving around, and the officer yells at them to back up as he curses.

https://twitter.com/ElPaso411/status/1015441471749705729

The video runs for about five minutes, and a second officer appears about 30 seconds into the video with a second car arriving a few minutes later. The boy who was being kept on the sidewalk is soon handcuffed and the officer who pulled the gun briefly pulls out his nightstick and gestures toward some of the bystanders.

The handcuffed teen is then put into the squad car, and soon an officer seemingly grabs the teen who was recording the scene on his phone. The teen hands his phone off to someone else and is then handcuffed and put in the backseat of the squad car as well. A woman is also there and confronts the officers, and one of them soon approaches her and she runs off.

A moment later, an officer towers over a younger boy, telling him to do something, and then the boy is pulled over to the squad car and pushed up against it. The woman there yells about how he is her son, and the officer holds the boy there throughout the rest of the video.

The Facebook video has already been viewed more than 2.4 million times, and it has more than 43,000 shares in addition to 10,000 reactions and tons of comments. People are buzzing about this video across social media and many are anxious for insight into what prompted the chaotic situation. The El Paso Police Department isn’t sharing much in the way of details yet, but they will likely need to share some information soon as more and more people ask questions about what happened.