Seattle police officer to be reviewed for arrest of innocent black man

[January 29, 2015]  SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle's police chief on Wednesday ordered a review of an officer who wrongly arrested an elderly black man last summer, an incident for which the department apologized a day earlier.

The move comes amid simmering tension in the United States over police treatment of African-Americans, sparked in large part by police killings of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York City last year.

Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole ordered the probe, which would also review measures in place to monitor the officer, for the July 9, 2014 arrest and a separate incident around the same time, she said in a statement.

The department issued an apology to the 69-year-old man on Tuesday and returned a golf club he was carrying during the incident, which the officer said he swung at her.
 

In a video released by the department, the man can be seen standing on a sidewalk, casually leaning on the club before the officer, who is white, approaches and yells at him to put it on the ground. He refused for several minutes before he was arrested.

Nowhere in the roughly seven-minute clip can he be seen swinging the club.

The man had accepted a plea deal with prosecutors before authorities looked into the incident again and recommended that the case be dismissed, police said.

(Reporting by Eric Johnson in Seattle and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Crispian Balmer)

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