The blows last nearly a minute and the whole thing was caught on cell phone video.
Jose Velasco is beaten with batons over and over again by Salinas, California, police officers as he lay on the ground.
But Police Chief Kelly McMillin says the footage only tells part of the story.
“I think anybody who looks at that video without context would have concerns,” he told CNN affiliate KSBW.
Officers were dispatched to the scene Friday for a man who was screaming, running into traffic and jumping on cars, the department said.
Police said Velasco had thrown his mother into oncoming traffic and slammed her body into the pavement.
They said he fought with officers and admitted he was high on methamphetamine — and the blows didn’t appear to hurt him.
“When you start making sense of how we got there and what the officers were trying to accomplish there, [it] still doesn’t make it pretty. But with that information now, it makes more sense,” McMillin said.
Mentally ill
But the suspect’s mother, Rita Acosta, who did not appear to be seriously injured, told a different story.
She said her son is mentally ill and was having an outburst. She was one of the people who called police, when Velasco wandered out into traffic near a place they had planned to meet.
“I recognized it was my son; right away I called 911 and asked for a medical unit and a police department to be called,” she said. She was afraid he’d get hit by a car.
He didn’t attack her but was waving his hands in the air, when she tried to pull him out of the street, she told CNN affiliate KION. Then police arrived. “I heard police say, ‘Get off of her; get off of her,'” she said.
Scuffle, Taser
Velasco didn’t attack police, but wouldn’t be still for them, she said. She said she cried out to them that her son was mentally ill.
But police said that when officers stepped in, Velasco “began to violently resist and attacked the officers,” according to a police statement.
He ripped an officer’s Taser with its holster from his gun belt. Officers Tased him twice, but it had little effect on him, police said, so they used their clubs. The escalation of force was in reaction to his actions, McMillin said.
“Police officers were responding to a violent man presenting a dangerous situation to his own mother and the community at large,” he told KSBW.
Former FBI assistant director Tiom Fuentes was skeptical after seeing the footage.
“When they’re clubbing someone like that, high or not high, that’s just not going to accomplish what you want to do unless you’re trying to make him unconscious,” he said.
Parole violation
Acosta had hoped police would only corral her son.
“When I called the police, I didn’t know that my son was going to be beaten so bad,” she said.
The outburst continued after the arrest, police said.
“While in route to the hospital, Velasco battered both a Salinas Police Officer and a Salinas Fire Paramedic by grabbing them through the rails on the gurney and attempting to bite them. Ultimately at the hospital he had to be chemically restrained,” the statement read.
Police are investigating the use of force in the arrest. Velasco faces felony charges from the incident as well as a parole violation charge.
Salinas has faced heat over police tactics before.
In March last year, rowdy protests broke out in Salinas after a video spread of a police shooting of a Latino man. He was the third Latino man shot by police that month. Three quarters of Salinas’ residents are Hispanic, according to U.S. Census data.