A 46-year-old American woman who was allegedly dragged out of her home twice naked as a worm by police officers, even though she was not the target of search warrants targeting her home, reportedly decided to sue the police. Florida for US$1 million.
“They took no precautions to preserve his dignity. She was humiliated and forced to do what they wanted her to do. She was treated like an animal,” the woman’s lawyer, Kevin Anderson, insisted Tuesday, according to NBC News.
The forty-year-old, LaTanya Griffin, reportedly filed a second lawsuit on Monday against the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, a Florida police force, to claim more than US$1 million in damages for two interventions that occurred on August 29, 2019 and on May 28, 2020.
According to the suit, law enforcement officials violated the woman’s Fourth Amendment rights, which prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures, when they twice forced her out of her home, in front of her children and in front of an audience, while she was naked.
What’s more, in both cases, the woman was not the target of the search warrants and no charges would have been filed after her forcible transport, her lawyer reportedly indicated, according to NBC News.
During the first intervention, it was at gunpoint that the woman was allegedly forced to remain naked in front of the officers and the public, as well as her 6-year-old daughter and her 14-year-old son, after they broke down the front door using a battering ram, she allegedly alleged.
Then, only a few months later, she was again forced out of her home at dawn when the police arrived with an arrest warrant, the target of which was not specified.
This time, the woman was allegedly handcuffed naked in front of her children, before the police put a tank top over her head to partially dress her, without however “concealing her genitals”, before dragging her outside until to the police vehicle parallel to a busy public road, according to the suit.
According to the woman’s lawyer, the “abominable” actions of the police officers forced the victim, humiliated and in emotional distress, to move from Okaloosa County.
Following the filing of a first complaint for the first incident, the police for their part reacted by maintaining that the actions would have been in accordance with “an established, reasonable and generally accepted police procedure” and that they would have been “accomplished in good faith”, by agents and their superiors.
