Officer in beating video suspended

A Los Angeles police officer has been suspended after slamming a black teenager into a car and punching him in the face, evoking memories of the notorious Rodney King beating 11 years ago.

Officer Jeremy Morse was put on administrative leave after a tourist filmed him hoisting the handcuffed 16-year-old to his feet and slamming him on the boot of a police car. The youth, Donovan Jackson, was left with a swollen eye and a mark across his neck. "It was wrong," he said. Officers said they were trying to speak to the teenager before he became "combative".

The video was taken last Saturday at a motel across the street from a fuel station in the Inglewood district. The footage, broadcast worldwide, shows the officer putting a hand on the back of the teenager's neck, hitting him with his other hand and appearing to choke him. Two other officers – one of them black – tried to intervene, one trying to pull away the first officer's arm.

Three investigations are being run. "[This video] is extremely disturbing to the Inglewood police department and to the administrators of the city," Sandi Gibbons, for the district attorney, said.

The police department said the officers had been checking the car driven by the teenager's father. A spokesman said the 16-year-old lunged at the officer, provoking the altercation.

But the family's lawyer, Joe Hopkins, said the teenager was developmentally disabled and a special education student with no arrest record. "I doubt he is emotionally capable of doing what they say he did," Mr Hopkins said.

The teenager had been wearing a heavy neck chain and the officers dragged him by it until it broke, Mr Hopkins said. A police spokeswoman said images had been collected from the fuel station's surveillance cameras but she did not know what they showed. The sheriff's department is also investigating the incident.

In 1991 three Los Angeles Police Department officers were caught on video clubbing and kicking Mr King after his car was stopped. Their acquittal a year later by a jury that had no black members sparked five days of rioting that caused 50 deaths, with 4,000 more people injured, 12,000 arrested and $1bn in property damage. Mr King won compensation of $3m.