May 20, 2022
In a very unusual turn of events, the government has arrested three police officers in response to public outrage over a video posted on social media that showed the officers roughing up a woman as they arrested her in Tehran.
“The police officers who violently arrested a young woman in Lavasan in eastern Tehran have been detained,” the government-owned Iran newspaper reported May 8.
Police officers are only rarely disciplined for using excessive force in the Islamic Republic, although the regime’s propaganda arm daily denounces American police for using excessive force. The regime routinely cites the case of the officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis by pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, ignoring the fact that the officer has been sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison.
In the Tehran video footage, a woman is seen screaming as she pleads with a man in civilian clothing, who pushes her to the ground in front of two uniformed police officers.
During the incident, a “plainclothes policeman hits the hand of the young woman” and “forces her into a vehicle while threatening her,” the newspaper said.
Tehran Deputy Police Commander Morad Moradi called the officers’ behavior “violent” and “contrary to police instructions,” but said the woman was suspected of drug possession.
Colonel Moradi said police became suspicious of the passengers of a vehicle after it began moving erratically, reported the Young Journalists Club, an agency affiliated with the state broadcaster.
The police attempted to stop them, but two women who were in the car—including the one who appeared in the video—fled without heeding the order to halt and later resisted arrest, he said.
A case was opened after the discovery of “quantities of marijuana” in the “confiscated” vehicle, the colonel said.
Another young woman was killed last fall by police in Ahvaz. Sanaz Mohammadian, 34, died about a month after police opened fire on her family car. No one has been charged in the killing. Police said they fired on the car after mistaking it for one used by a group of thieves.
They said they sounded their sirens and fired warning shots in the air before firing directly at the car and hitting the young mother in the back seat. Her husband, who was driving, said he heard no sirens or gunshots, but also said he was stopped at an intersection when a policeman fired into the car through the back window.
Few figures have been released on civilians killed by Iranian police in error. The only official statistics available in the past covered the amount of blood money paid in connection with fatal shootings: a total of 60 billion rials in 2016. In the two-year period of 2015 and 2016, according to police data, a total of 150 people died after being shot by police. But this figure only covered those whose cases had been examined by a court and closed. Since 2016, police have issued no information on the subject.
