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The Baltimore County Police Department is investigating the Wednesday morning arrest of a 16-year-old outside the Woodlawn library, about six weeks after police were accused of using excessive force in the arrest of a different teen inside the same library.

A video from a witness, obtained by The Baltimore Sun, shows two police officers, one uniformed and one in plainclothes, struggling with a teenager wearing a backpack. A plainclothes officer in a green shirt aims punches towards the teenager’s head, then grabs the teen’s face with his fingers while holding his other arm around the teen’s neck.

The two officers then take the 16-year-old, a 10th grader at nearby Woodlawn High School, to the ground as another officer approaches.

Baltimore County Police officers arrest a 16-year-old outside the Woodlawn library. The department is internally investigating the officers’ use of force. (Baltimore Sun Handout)

“Call my father, bro, call my father,” the teen tells a bystander as officers handcuff him.

Police brought the teenager to the Woodlawn precinct, where his father, Algernon Carter, picked him up. The 16-year-old was charged with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and hindering and obstructing an investigation, according to police spokesperson Joy Stewart.

Carter said police did not tell him his son’s charges. Charging documents for the teen are not publicly available because he is a minor.

The department identified the officers who used force as Detective E. Vicarini and Officer K. Cooper. Baltimore County salary records list only two names matching those initials: Evan Vicarini, a 15-year veteran of the department, and Officer Kevin Cooper, a 24-year-veteran.

A federal lawsuit that five county residents filed in January named Vicarini, the plainclothes detective in the video of Wednesday’s arrest, as one of multiple officers who allegedly used excessive force during a Jan. 25, 2020, marijuana stop in a Woodlawn parking lot that led to multiple arrests.

The department internally investigated allegations that Vicarini had used unnecessary force during two of those arrests and exonerated him, according to an Internal Affairs report for another officer who responded.

Carter, referring to Wednesday’s incident outside the library, said his son “has marks all over his face from that situation, he has a busted lip.”

“He’s a 16-year-old kid,” Carter added. “The way [the officer] was attacking him and punching him in the head, you can’t tell me that was necessary.”

Carter also expressed concern about the officers’ behavior after they dropped his son to the ground.

“You took his arm and you could’ve ripped it out of the socket,” he said.

The Sun is not naming the teen because he is a minor.

Stewart wrote in an email that the department would review the matter, as it does with all use-of-force incidents.

The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 4, which represents Baltimore County officers, said in an email Thursday to the The Sun that the “shortened” video did not show the full context of the arrest, “including the suspect’s threat to attack the officer, as well as the arrest and use of force that ensued.”

“These officers were part of an increased patrol due to the recent shooting that happened and they were keeping the community safe,” the statement added.

A teenager was injured Tuesday in a shooting near Edmondson Heights Elementary School in Woodlawn.

Baltimore County Public Library spokesperson Emily Williamson said Wednesday’s arrest happened before the Woodlawn library opened at 9 a.m. and had “nothing to do with the library.“ Williamson said the library is cooperating with the police investigation.

In an interview Wednesday, the 16-year-old said he was walking to school when he stopped in the library parking lot before 9 a.m., where an officer had hit his friend’s car with a police cruiser. He said he began taking photos of the car’s damaged front bumper. Then, a plainclothes officer arrived and followed the teen and his friends, telling them to go to school and to walk faster, the teen said.

“While I was walking, he just grabbed me,” the teenager said. “I said, ‘You’re not my father, you’re not going to tell me to walk any faster.’”