May 4 is typically a day of celebration of fans of the Star Wars universe (May the Fourth be with you!), but one woman cosplaying as a Stormtrooper had a terrible experience as police arrived and with an excess of force placed her in handcuffs, all over her plastic blaster in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Bradley Whalen, owner of the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina in Lethbridge planned a local promotion for May 4, “We had music playing in the parking lot, we had one of our staff dress up as a Stormtrooper kind of waving to people walking up and down the road, we had people stopping by and getting pictures with the Stormtrooper, we put a couple of promotions on in the restaurant to entice people to come.” As the staff member stood outside, several people called 911 to complain about a firearm, which appears to have been the plastic blaster carried by all Stormtroopers.
When the police arrived at around 11:20 a.m., three cruisers and a truck pulled into the parking lot and began shouting orders at the employee to discard the plastic blaster, which she did immediately.
The problems then escalated as the police told the employee to get on her knees, but that was no easy task. Whalen stated that, “She kept yelling at them that she couldn’t kneel down because, in that Stormtrooper costume, you can’t even sit down in it, like it’s impossible to sit down.”
Whalen also stated that there was no part on the police to attempt to de-escalate the situation, and that once the employee managed to position herself on the grown, the police pushed her down to the ground, causing an impact that gave her a bloody nose. In the video below, the employee can be heard crying following this point, as the impact on the concrete must have been painful.
While the excessive reaction of these trained police officers borders on incompetence, tensions were high in Canada at the time due to a recent killing spree in late April in Nova Scotia, on the other side of the country. Apparently, the police that arrived on scene were unaware of Star Wars, otherwise there is no real explanation for their behavior.
Thankfully, this excessive force is now being reviewed as the Lethbridge Police Service has announced that a service investigation is being launched into the way the officers handled the call the day prior, though the scope of that investigation of what could potentially come from it is not clear, it is good to see police accountability in cases as ridiculous as this.
Source: lethbridgenewsnow.com
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