In San Diego, Wild Discrepancies Between Video Footage And A Police Report

*This may be a local story, but it’s important to us at NewsTaco because it points to the main reason we do what we do. Our aim is to change the narrative about U.S. Latinos. Yes, the narrative needs changing in many places and at many levels – political narrative, educational narrative, immigrant narrative, the narrative of poverty, media and Latinos’ place at the the tables where decisions about all of these issues are made. This story is about a very specific narrative, the official one given by police and the other one told by a Latino family and the video cameras that captured the incident. VL

By Rigoberto Hernandez, Code Switch

Voice of San Diego has a head-spinning story of a policing debacle involving a late-night cop patrol, two Peruvian-American brothers and a break-in that wasn’t.

Late one night in July, Luis and Diego Lobaton were ambushed by San Diego police, Luis was beaten up and they were both arrested. Their crime: walking into their family’s store, to which they had keys, after a cigarette break. H.G. Reza reports:

“There was no 911 call, no worried neighbors who drew the officers there that night. Police on patrol simply watched the brothers separately take out keys and enter the store, and decided something nefarious was in the works. The whole thing went down because of a suspected burglary in the brothers’ own home.”

But where this story really goes off the rails is in the miles of sunlight between the police report and video footage from the store’s surveillance camera, according to Voice of San Diego’s analysis:

  • Police say Luis, 21, took a “fighter’s stance” and that Luis attempted twice to hit one of the officers. “Lobaton does not appear to swing or lunge at the officers in the video and actually appears to be backpedaling when an officer rushes inside and begins striking him,” says the Voice report.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy of Code Switch]

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