LOS ANGELES (CNS) – Amid public concern over three videotaped incidents in which officers used force, the Los Angeles Police Department plans to host a series of community meetings to discuss with the public why officers use force and how the department investigates such encounters, it was reported today.

Police Chief Charlie Beck ordered meetings held by the department’s 21 stations throughout the city, Lt. Andrew Neiman, an LAPD spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times. The dates of the meetings have not yet been set, Neiman said, adding that he expected them to occur in the near future “because it is such a hot topic right now.”

The meetings will give the public an opportunity to ask questions about the three incidents that reignited concerns about police brutality.

In one arrest several weeks ago, a cellphone video showed four officers tackling a 20-year-old Venice skateboarder who they said resisted arrest, The Times reported. One officer hit him in the face.

Then a video emerged in which an LAPD officer in the San Fernando Valley was shown slamming a handcuffed woman to the ground before appearing to give his partner a fist bump. The woman, a nurse who was pulled over for holding a cellphone while driving, suffered face and body bruises.

Word of a third encounter surfaced when The Times recently reported a woman had died during a confrontation in July outside her South Los Angeles home. In that incident, several officers struggled to take the woman into custody and place her into the rear seat of a police car.

The car’s digital recording equipment captured a female officer berating the woman and stomping on her genitals during the struggle, according to police, The Times reported.

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