Once again, a pool confrontation has resulted in a young Black woman getting manhandled by police officers. This time, the location is Fairfield, Connecticut where a family visiting from Ohio was attempting to enjoy the sunshine at the Fairfield Aquatic Center. According to reports, the family was asked to leave when one teen didn’t have proper swim trunks. After Krystal Dixon, 33, the adult who accompanied them, returned with the required trunks, she was told the teen still would not be able to get in.
From here, an altercation apparently ensued.
The New York Daily News reports:
As police officers arrived, Dixon tried to get the others out of the pool, passing by one officer who ordering her to leave, Hamilton said. Some time after that, police tried to detain some of the adolescents, as seen in intense video shot by a bystander. It’s unclear exactly how the confrontation escalated.
The video appears to show a group of white officers restraining several black youths, including one girl who is grabbed by the neck and pushed against a police car. She was later identified as Dixon’s niece.
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Several officers work to pull another girl off a gate she is grasping onto, while repeatedly telling her to stop resisting arrest. Police confirmed that they used pepper spray during the arrests and one officer is heard instructing a handcuffed female how to blink the spray out of her eyes near the end of the video.
The six-minute video begins with a brief argument between members of Dixon’s group and pool employees, before abruptly cutting to the police scene.
Four people were arrested at the pool. Dixon and another adult were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, a Fairfield Police source told the Daily News. A 15-year-old boy faces those same charges, while a 12-year-old girl was charged with assault and resisting arrest, police said.
Dixon, who said she is six months pregnant, was rushed to a hospital for an evaluation after her arrest, but did not suffer any confirmed injuries. She also claimed her niece suffering a fractured jaw and broken ribs, but those injuries have not been independently confirmed, according to cops.
Every officer who responded to the scene was white, a police source confirmed to the Daily News.
Dixon and her supporters insist there was a racial motivation to the officers’ actions.
“I could surmise or opine on why (pool employees) wanted them out,” Dixon’s attorney Clyde Bennett told the Daily Beast.
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