If you watch the video, the girl grabs his arm while he’s trying to detain the other girl. Then the girl pushes him with both hands, knocking him back, and then she grabs at him again — that’s when he hits her, once, not all that hard apparently because she just takes a step back, and then he tries to detain HER while the first girl climbs on his back.
Frankly, if the 1st girl had instead grabbed his weapon, he could be a dead cop. The entire description of this video by the news is frankly false. In fact, the description should be “police officer attacked by teen, subdues her.”
Taking a guess here, but I’d suspect a cop is trained to punch a person in the face, near the eyes, mouth, nose, so the pain makes the person pull back, withdraw their hands to their own face. With a choice of clubs, gun, taser, or fist, the cop certainly had to use one or the other.
The cop is being criticized for not having taken the girl down on the ground. But when you look at the vid, it’s pretty clear why the cop didn’t want to be on the ground with the smarmy little animal. He would have been jumped/kicked if he was down, because he was surrounded by jackals.