Image via The Free Thought Project

A Milwaukee police spokesman is hoping the community will understand the sympathy the cops showed for a 75-year-old grandmother when they wrongfully arrested her.

Sergeant Timothy Gaureke was referring to an incident that took place last week when Joy McFarlin had a road accident.

The widow was driving her late husband’s Dodge Dakota pickup to meet friends for bingo followed by a buffet lunch.

She was driving on Wisconsin Avenue when another motorist, who she says had run a red light, hit her truck.

Her car spun around uncontrollably and when it stopped in the median, cars zoomed past her from the driver’s side making it impossible for her to get out.

So she decided to exit using the passenger side door instead. This is when a do-gooder spotted her struggle and decided to help.

Badly shaken from the incident, she did not get a chance to ask the name of the young man who had lent a helping hand. He made sure she was out of harm’s way and accompanied her to a bus stop across the street and when the paramedics arrived he left.

Then two Milwaukee police officers are male and female approached her.

McFarlin says the female assumed the role of bad cop immediately.

She threatened the already nervous elderly woman with jail and asked her to tell the truth. Even when McFarlin told her exactly what had happened, the officer disagreed with her account and insisted that she was lying.

The injured woman, who was in significant pain by now, was then taken by paramedics to a Aurora Sinai Medical Centre. The two cops turned up again and the female officer continued with her aggressive line of questioning.

She went on to tell the grandmother that a video has emerged of a black man getting out of her truck and she would end up behind bars for lying.

This confused McFarlin, even the man who had helped her earlier was white – there were no African Americans involved in the incident to the best of her knowledge.

Then the officers decided to arrest her, and in an act of clemency handcuffed her in front rather than the back owing to her old age.

In full view of patients and medical staff they accompanied her to the police car.

She was not allowed to call anyone; however, a doctor at Aurora Sinai managed to contact one of her friends who later picked her up from the police station where she had been taken for questioning and subsequently released.

There is no evidence of what the police claimed.

Speaking of the technique the officers used, whereby they said another man had been seen crawling out of the vehicle, Sergeant Gaureke said it was pretty common for officers.

“It’s to encourage the person, ‘Look, the jig is up, we know what happened. You may as well just tell us.’ She stuck with her story and that’s why she was arrested,” he added.

However, in McFarlin’s case it is fairly twisted because she was telling the truth all along.

She has decided not to file a formal complaint or pursue a legal course of action.

All she wants is for people to know that she was treated badly.