CHARLOTTE — Security guards were caught on video fighting with a man and kneeling on his back. That man would later die at the hospital.
Channel 9′s Evan Donovan delved into whether or not those guards were following protocol.
A witness posted a video of the incident to Charlitt’s Instagram page showed a man outside the transit center in Uptown surrounded by several security guards.
At one point, the guard beats the man with a baton. You can then see what looks like the same security guard kicking the man while both of them are on the ground.
After the man is kicked, he seems subdued and grasps at someone’s leg. Another guard then kneels on the man’s back, while someone else tells him to stay down.
Eric Schneider, a veteran of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department who retired in April, gave his feedback after reviewing the footage.
“It does look like somebody’s pulling that officer off of that person,” Schneider said.
Schneider is the director of training at Spartan Training Solutions and offers classes for people who want to become security guards.
“We have to realize that these are very stressful situations. In these videos, we don’t know what happened before. These are bits and clips,” Schneider explained.
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Schneider said North Carolina’s Protective Security Board requires 16 hours of training for unarmed security officers. An additional 20 is required for them to carry a gun.
However, training on the use of a baton, for example, is not required for a guard to carry one.
Schneider also weighed on the protocol regarding a security guard placing their knee in the back of a suspect.
“So everybody looks at the knee at the back, and everybody goes back to George Floyd. And they and they go back and they say, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s no good. That’s bad. You know, the knee’s too close to the neck.’ Well, you know, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that. Right? A knee across the shoulder blades is a good way to control somebody. Now, you’re not putting your entire weight on that person because you’re constricting their ability to breathe,” Schneider explained.
The man who died in this incident has yet to be identified.
Channel 9 has reached out to Strategic Security, the company that provides guards for the transit center. We are waiting to hear back.
We also reached out to the Charlotte Area Transit System about this incident, but they referred as question to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
The police department said the investigation into this incident is active and ongoing.
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