On Aug. 7, 2016, Geneva Smith, 84, got a taste of police overreaction when her door was kicked in by members of the Muskogee, Oklahoma Police Department. The police were after her son who ran a stop sign and ran inside his mother’s home. Officers went to the home and demanded that the man come out, when he did not respond, they entered the home. Upon entering the home, with guns drawn they encounter the man in the living room. The man yells, “I didn’t do nothing” and is immediately tased by officers.
Geneva Smith then enters the room, confused and upset by the commotion and shouts “What’s going on?” An officer shouts “Stay there ma’am” and 40 seconds later a White female officer shoots the senior citizen directly in the face with pepper spray. Smith is seen raising her hands above her head and falling to the floor after being sprayed. Officers then placed Smith’s hands behind her back and handcuffed the elderly woman. She was then taken to jail, where she suffered a panic attack and was then hospitalized over concerns over her medical condition and later released.
Muskogee Police Chief Russ Eskridge stated to media, “This is a very important issue. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. There’s a lot of prejudgment going on, a lot of concern. … Videos can’t give you the full sense of what happened. But at the same time they do either validate or expose any worries that you might have.”
In response to the public’s outrage of the incident, the body-cam footage was released to media outlets. An attorney representing the city of Muskogee stated the pepper-spraying of Geneva Smith was a reasonable use of force “given the totality of the circumstances …”
An internal investigation was initiated and the officers involved are being interviewed to get their side of the encounter, in the meantime, Smith has stated that she still feels the effects of the pepper spray weeks after the incident. Smith indicated this week that she intends to file a lawsuit against the Muskogee Police Department and the local NAACP has offered to provide legal counsel.
Marlon J. Coleman, president of the Muskogee Christian Minister’s Union in conjunction with the Muskogee NAACP Branch issued the following statement yesterday:
“We are deeply troubled that 84-year-old Geneva Smith was pepper sprayed and arrested, and detained for no justifiable reason by Muskogee police officers. What’s even more disturbing is the appearance that Muskogee police officials are more concerned with putting the proper ‘spin’ on the situation rather than rightfully accepting responsibility for their errors in this incident. A misdemeanor is no reason to kick in a resident’s door and treat that resident as the criminal when she had nothing to do with the incident at all. The proper corrective action should be taken within the police department for this inappropriate behavior, because Geneva Smith was the victim and not the criminal.”
