But apart from the beating, that's what this story is about. Cops don't have the right to confiscate people's phones. You have the right to film police doing their jobs in public spaces.
My point isn't that this is a good thing. It's that this confiscation doesn't come close to proving that they committed a criminal homicide, because they routinely confiscate phones for other wrong-headed reasons, too, which they then return, after a cooling-off period, to convince the amateur videographer that it's not worth the inconvenience to film them going about their business.
The other issue is that the deceased's ambulance chaser is making this guy out to be Parent of the Year, complete with carefully selected pictures of him with his family. A prosecutor looking to charge these cops with criminal homicide will need to look at the guy's toxicology report. Was this guy a Hispanic Rodney King, hopped up on stimulants and fighting the cops every step of the way? You'll have no argument from me that he did not deserve to die. But it's a big stretch from saying the cops accidentally asphyxiated him to saying they deliberately beat him to death.