An Arizona couple is suing Phoenix and its police department for $10 million after a video captured officers drawing their weapons and threatening to shoot the family of four, reports the Washington Post. On a family outing last month, the four-year-old daughter of Dravon Ames and his fiancee, Iesha Harper, took a doll from a Family Dollar Store. Police followed the couple, and once the family car pulled into their babysitter’s apartment complex, an officer approached the vehicle with his gun drawn and yanked open the front door, their suit said. Despite rules that require police to wear body cameras, the officers were not wearing them. Passersby recorded the encounter. “I’m going to put a cap in your a–,” one officer said to Ames as a second officer, whose weapon was also pointed at Ames, walked up to the car, saying, “I’m going to shoot you in your f—ing face.”
The first officer pulled Ames, 22, from the car, pushed his head into the pavement, handcuffed him, threw him against the car, ordered him to spread his legs and “kicked him in the right leg so hard that (he) collapsed.” The officers allegedly pointed their weapons at the visibly pregnant Harper, 24, and her two children. “The first officer grabbed the mother and the baby around … their necks, and tried to take the baby out of the mother’s hand,” the claim alleged. One officer threw Harper, who had handed the children to a bystander, into the police car face first, then handcuffed her. Neither Ames nor Harper was arrested. Mayor Kate Gallego said the incident “was completely inappropriate and clearly unprofessional. There is no situation in which this behavior is ever close to acceptable. As a mother myself, seeing these children placed in such a terrifying situation is beyond upsetting.”