Pinned to the ground by officers who kneed and struck him, Lawrence Crosby screamed whatever he could think of to convince them that he was a law-abiding PhD student, not a violent car thief.<\/p>\n
“This is my vehicle, sir,” he said, his voice captured by the dashboard-camera video in October 2015. “I have evidence . . . I purchased this vehicle Jan. 23, 2015, from Libertyville Chevrolet.”<\/p>\n
It wasn’t enough. The officers placed him in handcuffs in the driveway of a church, two blocks from the police station in Evanston, Ill.<\/p>\n
Police released the dash-cam video earlier this week, detailing the half-hour encounter that sparked a civil suit from Crosby and a discussion about race and policing in this city of 75,000, just north of Chicago.<\/p>\n
The video includes footage from the dash cam of one of the officers involved in the altercation. But it’s also synced with video of a personal dash cam Crosby kept running in his car.<\/p>\n
On that night, Crosby was headed to Northwestern University, where he was studying for his doctoral degree in civil engineering.
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