New bodycam video has been released of an Arizona State University cheerleader's arrest and it's sparking backlash about the police officer's use of force. CBS News' Shanelle Kaul has more.
Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 6 October 2026
Newly released bodycam disputes both the union chief's payday theory and the department's own force count.
As it ran on the front
Did the department's first account of how much force they used on that cheerleader match what showed up later on the camera? I already know the answer to that one. Give me a second, I had it written down somewhere, here. That's not my sentence. That's theirs.
I wrote something else down the same week, a different page of the same notebook. A veteran Tempe police officer, speaking for their union, told the New York Post that the cheerleader and her legal team are "fictionalizing" what happened. They said there's clear video evidence she struck a police officer. I don't underline things as a rule. I underlined that one: clear.…
…(cont) There's a camera over the register at the corner store on my block, the crooked one, pointed more at the lottery machine than the door. I asked the owner once to run it back, the day I knocked a jar of pickles off the shelf. He found the moment easy enough. He found my face easy enough too, laughing behind the counter before I'd even picked myself up off the floor. Same tape. What a person is looking for, when they ask to see it, isn't always what somebody else is looking for.
So which is it, with this one? Does the union chief's statement to the Post describe what's on the footage, or does it describe what they think she's trying to get out of it? I go back and forth, I keep going back to the same page. The statement doesn't say the force matched what the department first reported. It says she's angling for a payday. Those are two different subjects, filed under the same quote.
And does CBS's report about the footage talk about a payday, or does it talk about how forceful the officer was? Here's what I've got written down: backlash over use of force. Not backlash over a lawsuit. Not backlash over a payday. Backlash over force, and specifically over whether the department's first account of that force held up once the tape came out.
I keep flipping back through these pages, sorry, bear with me, I never got around to buying the kind with tabs. Here's the union chief, on the record, suspecting a payday. Here's CBS, on the record, reporting that the footage disputes the department's own initial claims. Both from the same week. Both about the same piece of footage. I'm not telling you what that means. I'm asking which one the tape backs up, because it can't back up both at the same time, not if one of them is about money she might get and the other is about force the department already said was something different.
Does the department's first account of the force and the footage CBS describes say the same thing, or two things? I think I know, but you didn't get the facts from me today, you got them from the Post and from CBS, and I'd rather you check my notebook against theirs than take my word for it.
Alright. I'll let you get back to your day. Oh, actually, excuse me, one more thing before you go. I know I said I wouldn't come back to this, I'm sorry, let me put it a different way. The footage the department released, the one CBS says disputes their own first account of the force used, was it making the same case the union chief made to the Post, the one about a payday, the one with the clear video evidence against her? Or was it making a different case, just as clear.
“You get it now? The union puts out "she's angling for a payday" the same week the camera comes out disputing the department's own story about how hard they hit her. One side's selling motive, the other side's got the tape, and the tape doesn't care whose paycheck it protects. That's the whole racket: accuse her of chasing money while the department's own first account turns out to be the one that needed checking.”
“Look, the union chief is just raising a fair question about motive, that's all, people do sue, it happens — I'm not saying she's lying, did I say she's lying? The department's initial account was preliminary, these things get refined, that's normal police work, it's not like — okay, it's a little like that, but refined, I said refined.”
The receipts
Arizona State University senior Eryn Bonner was hit with two misdemeanor charges last week in Tempe after a video captured cops allegedly tackling and punching her during an arrest in July.
Newly released footage of a Tempe, Arizona, police officer arresting a woman has sparked backlash for disputing the initial claims about how forceful he was. CBS News' Shanelle Kaul has the latest.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.