Video: Surveillance shows fired NOPD officer striking 16-year-old inmate

Video: Surveillance shows fired NOPD officer striking 16-year-old inmate with shackles

Video in LINK

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A teenage girl struck by a shackle-wielding New Orleans police officer told authorities last year she had been having nightmares about her violent treatment at the city’s juvenile detention center, according to an investigative file released this week.

The September run-in prompted the firing last month of Officer Terrance Saulny, a 25-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department found to have used excessive force in restraining the bipolar 16-year-old at the Youth Study Center. Surveillance footage of the incident, released Wednesday by the Office of Independent Police Monitor, raised fresh questions about why Saulny faced no criminal charges after investigators determined the officer struck the unruly inmate at least twice with a set of four-point restraints.

The girl was not seriously injured but received a bruise on her bottom lip and a small cut to her chest, according to an investigation by the Police Department’s Public Integrity Bureau.

“She’s in the detention center, so of course she may have done something to be in there. But that doesn’t give you the right to bang her up the way (Saulny) did,” said Michael Hall, a New Orleans attorney representing the girl and her mother. “He was fighting like she was a man.”

Hall acknowledged the video he viewed — the footage, he said, rendered the girl’s mother “speechless” — contained no audio of the profanity the teen used toward the officers as she protested her incarceration and pleaded for her mother. But he said Saulny appeared to commit an avoidable battery on the girl rather than de-escalate the situation.

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Searched, SIAP