Video shows Black girls on ground, handcuffed in mistaken stolen-car stop
[NBC News]
Ben Kesslen and Tim Stelloh
,NBC News•August 4, 2020
Video shows Black girls on ground, handcuffed in mistaken stolen-car stop

Brittney Gilliam was on a girls’ trip with her nieces, sister and daughter to get their nails done Sunday morning when suddenly, in a parking lot, they were surrounded by police.

The officers, according to a bystander and Gilliam’s lawyer, had their guns drawn, ordered the group of Black women and girls to lay face down while handcuffing some of them, police and the family said.

Video of the scene taken by the bystander and obtained by NBC Denver affiliate KUSA shows the four girls in the group on the ground, some of them handcuffed, crying and screaming as officers surround them.

Aurora police said in a statement to NBC News that officers conducted a “traffic stop” of Gilliam’s car on the belief it was stolen because it shared the plate number of a stolen motorcycle.

“The people in the car were ordered out onto the ground and placed in handcuffs,” public information officer Faith Goodrich said in the statement.

When the officers in the Denver suburb determined the stolen motorcycle had plates from a different state, they “unhandcuffed everyone involved, made efforts to explain what happened, and apologized,” Goodrich said.