Saturday the site of National newspaper published the video of the violent arrest of a twenty-five-year-old Italian student, Matteo Falcinelli, by some police officers in Miami, in the United States. The video dates back to February, comes from the bodycam of one of the officers involved and shows a very violent scene: Falcinelli’s wrists and ankles are tied together with a practice called hogtievery controversial even in the United States.
Between Saturday and Sunday the video was filmed by various Italian newspapers, which also reconstructed the circumstances of Falcinelli’s arrest. After the release of the video, the Italian Foreign Ministry he made it known who has been following the case for two months and who according to reconstructions seems that Falcinelli has undergone “particularly violent prison treatment”.
Be careful, the video is quite strong.
Falcinelli is from Spoleto, in the province of Perugia, and is in Miami because he is attending a degree course in management at Florida International University. His arrest took place on February 25th, as evidenced by the date in the video recorded by the bodycam. The story that led to the arrest is not yet entirely clear: according to his family, Falcinelli had entered a place where some sex workers were working without his knowledge.
After refusing to pay several hundred dollars for a sexual service, Falcinelli claims he received hostile treatment from the managers: in an interview with Republic his mother, Vlasta Studenicova, also speculates that he was stunned with some substance. Falcinelli then had an argument with both the club’s bouncer and according to Corriere della Sera it would still have “remained on a verbal level”, both with some police officers called from the premises. Always Republic citing some judicial documents, he writes that Falcinelli was arrested for resisting a public official and violating private property.
At that point Falcinelli was taken to a police station, where the bodycam video of one of the officers was filmed. In the video released by National newspaper, which is probably a summary of what Falcinelli’s lawyers obtained, four officers are seen immobilizing the boy by tying his wrists and ankles together. For almost the entire video Falcinelli shouts and tries to turn around, in a state of evident vulnerability. Falcinelli’s family said that after he was tied up with the procedure hogtieFalcinelli would have remained in that position for 13 minutes, without anyone being in the room with him.
After three days in prison, Falcinelli was released on bail, and in the preliminary phase of the trial the judge proposed that he drop all the charges in exchange for a commitment to attend a re-education programme. Falcinelli accepted. According to the family’s story, however, his lawyers only obtained the video of the arrest in mid-April, and therefore only later had proof of the violence that occurred that day.
The practice of the so-called hogtie it is considered controversial both in Western Europe, where it is very rare, and in the United States, where it has no longer been used for decades in some large cities such as New York and Los Angeles. In 1995 the State Department advised against its use to the police force in an official document. Yet some departments still use it today: a 2021 survey by NBC News and the news site Marshall Project found that from 2010 to mid-2021 at least 23 people died after or while being immobilized with a hogtie or its more accepted version, lo hobble – which requires their ankles to be tied together, and not at their wrists – while they were detained by US law enforcement.
Falcinelli’s family said that the particularly traumatic circumstances of the arrest had heavily influenced the man’s life. «Since he was released he was hospitalized due to his injuries, then transferred to a psychiatric hospital because he was at risk of suicide. Now he is followed by psychologists and psychiatrists, takes psychotropic drugs, is afraid to leave the campus where we are. He has nerve damage in both hands, but also pain in his neck and back,” Studenicova told Republic. Falcinelli’s family told the National newspaper who intends to report the US authorities for the treatment he suffered during his arrest.