Woman Gets Blindsided By Police Officer During Arizona Riot; Department Investigating

There are some new developments from Saturday night’s confrontation between University of Arizona students and Tucson police. At around the 20-second mark of the video above, a woman gets tackled by a police officer for no apparent reason. “These girls had been trying to get to their car. The girl is on her phone not paying attention and this cop came out of nowhere and just leveled her,” the woman who shot the video told the Arizona Star. “After that everyone just started yelling and she started crying.”

A police spokesman tells the paper that the department is investigating the video internally.

A separate Arizona Star report provides some context for how the initial violence between the police and crowd began:

"Police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly and gave the crowd orders over a PA system to disperse immediately several times in English and Spanish, the release said. People began throwing beer bottles, cans and firecrackers at police. Some firecrackers rolled under a patrol vehicle."

A neighboring bar owner praised police for the way they handled the conversation, but noted that the college kids “weren’t unruly” before they were ordered to disperse.

Per Deadspin, some of the students who were injured on Saturday night are “preliminarily planning to file lawsuits against police.”