Police pulled a NC woman from her vehicle and into a three-year legal battle over use of force.
Brenda Bryant should have complied. Instead, when the Mooresville police officer who stopped her for failure to stay in her lane told her to step out of her car, she objected.
“I don’t like to get out. It’s 18 degrees,” she said, according to court documents. Officer Alex Arndt said she needed to get out or she would be charged with resisting an officer. Bryant responded, “Hold on just a minute, okay?”
Arndt then opened the car door and pulled Bryant out, hurting her surgically repaired right wrist, she said. Outside the car, frightened and agitated, Bryant called to passing cars for help. Arndt handcuffed her and put her in the back of his patrol car.
That nighttime incident in January 2018 was the start of a legal saga that today has come to echo larger issues of police accountability and use of force.
“If they do this to a 65-year-old sober woman not committing a crime, what would they do to a criminal?” Bryant told me. “I was terrified for a long time, but I made up my mind that I would no longer be terrified. Now I am fighting.”
Bryant has fought before, challenging South Carolina officials over the care of her intellectually disabled daughter, who was assaulted while living in a group home. But the Mooresville case is not only about being legally contentious. It raises the now too-familiar question of why police encounters in seemingly minor incidents can sometimes escalate. Police departments should track such cases and assess whether officers are focusing more on asserting their authority than on finding a less-confrontational way to resolve a situation.
Charged with failure to maintain a lane and resisting an officer, Bryant has lost her case in district court, superior court and the North Carolina Court of Appeals and has been sentenced to probation. “It has cost us quite a bit of money. I’ve gone to court at least 20 times,” she said. “I want justice and I want change.”
Now, more than three years after the incident, Bryant has filed a petition with the state Supreme Court seeking to have her conviction dismissed. Her lawyer asks in the petition whether the state should sanction police behavior in which officers “forcefully dragged [Bryant] out of her vehicle, handcuffed her, and packed her into a patrol vehicle, all within 40 seconds of encountering her?”
Another question about proper use of force now involves Arndt, but this time in a fatal police shooting case. He and other officers responded to a 911 call on Aug. 2, 2020, reporting a potentially suicidal Mooresville man. Police say the man, Christopher Craven, 38, pointed a gun at the officers and they fired in self-defense.
Mooresville police have not named the officers who shot Craven, but The Charlotte Observer reported that Craven’s family asked an Iredell County judge in March to have police provide the bodycam videos from two officers at the scene – Arndt and Christopher Novelli.
Alex Heroy, a Charlotte attorney representing the Craven family, told WSOC-TV that the videos show, “There was no attempt to deescalate. They told him to put his hands up. He did. They told him to get on the ground, and a second after, they shot him until he was dead.”
An autopsy found that Craven had been shot at least 15 times. The Iredell County district attorney has recused herself and the shooting is now being reviewed by the Randolph County district attorney.
Meanwhile, Bryant is waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court will act on her petition. Even if it’s denied, she plans to keep pressing for changes. She is advocating for more transparency in police disciplinary records and for changes in state law that would give the public greater access to the videos.
Bryant’s case involves a misdemeanor charge but it touches on a major issue. Police accountability would be enhanced – and such future situations reduced – with a closer review of routine police encounters that become contested cases.