Newly released police bodycam footage from last fall shows a Tulsa police officer taunting an African-American senior citizen who reportedly was suffering through a mental health crisis. The female cop can be seen telling her colleagues “this is going to be fun” before the violent engagement.
Now the woman who was arrested has secured a legal team to press claims of police brutality.
Officer Ronni Carrocia, a female cop in the Tulsa Police Department, was prominently featured in a 6-minute edited version of a 90-minute video from a colleague’s body camera footage put out by a city council member.
In the clip, she is seen mocking LaDonna June Paris, a mentally ill 70-year-old Black woman who’d locked herself in a bathroom while apparently experiencing a manic episode associated with mental illness.
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While the video has caused public outrage, the department says their officer did not sway from the force’s policy on handling situations like this, though her demeanor can “be received as unprofessional.”
The law firm representing Paris revealed the great-grandmother and seminary student was “was taunted, harassed and antagonized by Tulsa Police Department officers before they brutalized her while placing her under arrest for behavioral manifestations of a mental health disorder in October 2021.”
Solomon-Simmons Law further states: “The TPD officers involved were fully aware that Ms. Paris was having a bipolar manic episode, yet they still viciously provoked and attacked Ms. Paris while laughing off her disability as if it were a joke.”
According to a police report of the arrest, on Oct. 25, 2021, the city’s Community Response Team was initially called by an emergency medical service worker to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore building, located on 1234 S. Norwood, to assist in rescuing Paris, a bipolar senior in the community who had locked herself in the bathroom at the property. They were not available so Carrocia and her colleagues, who were 15 minutes away, answered the call.
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