Minutes later, the officer walks up to the home's front step. "One thing," he says, acting like he's going to speak calmly with the family. Instead, he shoves the mother out of the way and sprints inside the house as the family members wail bloodcurdling screams.
"What the fuck is going on!?" some family members scream. But whether the whole ordeal was actually necessary is another story, considering the cop ended up making just two arrests for petty, nonviolent crimes. Two brothers, Desean McIntosh, 20, and Daryl Cunningham, 18, were booked on low-level drug charges, resisting arrest, using a fake ID, and running a red light.
Critics are already asking whether FLPD needed to violently force its way into the home just to put two men under 21 in jail for misdemeanor drug offenses. Their mother, who is identified as Williams Wisdom on Facebook, alleges the police had no legal right to burst in.
"They had no warrant [and] I gave them no permission to enter my home," she says in a Facebook post.
Fort Lauderdale PD says it's "aware of the mentioned video and looking into it further. The Fort Lauderdale Police Department encourages anyone who witnessed the incident to contact our Internal Affairs Office at 954-828-6956."
The boys' mother posted two clips online yesterday that detail a tense standoff in which she repeatedly accuses the officer of harassing her family, conducting an "illegal search" of her car, and handcuffing her teenage daughter for no reason. (She did not immediately respond to a written message from New Times.)
The first clip begins outside their home, with a teenage girl already handcuffed. The mother asks what crime her teenage daughter committed to justify getting placed in cuffs.
"Ma'am, don't talk to me," the officer responds.
"I need your identifying information, I need your badge and employee ID number," the mom asks.
"You need to get out of my face right now," the cop responds.
The officer repeatedly asks the car's driver to leave the house and come talk to him, which the driver, later identified as the 20-year-old McIntosh, initially refuses to do. When the mother asks again what the whole stop was for, the officer says she has "nothing to do with this."
"What do you mean?" the woman responds. "I am their mother. These are my children."
"They're big boys and girls," the cop responds. (At least two people involved were teenagers, and one was a minor.)
In a second clip, the cop starts rifling through McIntosh's car — to which the mother starts screaming that he didn't have anyone's permission to open the vehicle.
"Actually, it smells like drugs in here," the officer responds.
"Oh, really?" the woman screams. The cop then asks his fellow officers if they smell marijuana. One cop can be faintly heard saying he doesn't, but he's overridden by the other officers. (Possession of
After more back-and-forth, the officer winds up finding an ID, and asks where McIntosh is, because he's apparently under arrest for "fraud." (That "fraud" charge later turned out to be for possessing someone else's ID, which is fairly common for people under 21.)
"He doesn't want to talk to you," the brother, Cunningham, responds. The officer walks back to talk with his comrades for a second, and then slowly walks right up to the family. "One thing," he says. Then, at 7:50 in the clip below, he shoves the mother out of the way and storms into the home:
"Chill, Daryl! Chill!" the siblings scream. (Cunningham was booked on charges of "resisting an officer with violence.") Someone shouts, repeatedly, "What the fuck are you doing?" at the officer as he then shines a flashlight into one of the woman's bedrooms.
The mother is now adamant that the officers overstepped their bounds, and has been begging friends to share the video online.
"My 16yr daughter was in her bedroom asleep she was awakened by this officer in her bedroom standing up on top of her head in an attempt to arrest an individual that was inside," she wrote. "He also placed my son
Both men currently sit in the Broward Sheriff's Office Main Jail.
