Sheriff’s officers restrained three people protesting data centers Tuesday night, including one woman who ended up on the ground during a tense exchange caught on video.

Officers were escorting the woman out of a Utah County Planning Commission meeting Tuesday evening, after commissioners voted to endorse new rules for data centers on unincorporated county land.

Videos taken by the Party for Socialism and Liberation Salt Lake City and shared with The Salt Lake Tribune show officers leading the woman out of the chamber before she hit the ground with a loud smack. While on the ground, an officer holds a hand against the back of her neck.

“I’m not doing anything, I’m not doing anything,” the woman repeated as she lay on the floor, raising a hand. Another woman can be heard shouting, “Hey, do not restrain her!”

The woman was later identified as Aspen Azalea, a Utah dancer and activist.

In a statement, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office said the woman argued with deputies when they first tried to remove her from the meeting room. When a deputy “took hold of the female and began to remove her from the row of chairs,” she struck the deputy in the groin, the sheriff’s office said.

Deputies then removed her and two others to the lobby, and the woman and the deputy who was holding her “went to the ground,” the sheriff’s office said.

In the video, Azalea can be heard yelling at the deputies. “My jaw hurts,” she tells the deputies. “You literally threw my face on the f---ing ground.”

After she was restrained, the statement said, the woman told deputies that her jaw hurt. Deputies called over EMTs from Provo Fire Department, who “did not find emergent or immediate injuries,” the statement said.

Azalea was booked into the Utah County Jail, the statement said, charged with disrupting a meeting, a class A misdemeanor, and interference with a police officer and assault on a police officer, both class B misdemeanors. The two people who left the meeting with her were given citations, the statement said.

Azalea apparently was released from custody Wednesday morning. She did not appear on the Utah County jail inmate logs Wednesday, and she was posting online Wednesday morning.

After she was released, Azalea told The Tribune she got a CT scan because of “intense jaw pain.” While her jaw was not broken, she said she has a concussion and bruises on her jaw, shoulder and knee.

Azalea reposted the video of her detention on the Instagram account for the grassroots activist group Protect Utah. “That sound was my jaw,” she wrote in the video’s caption.

In response to the arrest, the activist group is organizing a rally at the Capitol at 6 p.m. Wednesday, according to an Instagram post. In the post, organizers call for “Justice for Aspen” and the arrest of the officer who restrained her. The rally will follow another rally put on by Protect Utah at 4:45 p.m., also at the Capitol.

“Across the state and the country, working people are coming together to organize and fight for popular control of AI,” the post reads. “We won’t let greedy tech billionaires or their violent cops and complicit officials stop us.”

What regulations were proposed

The confrontation unfolded as residents and protesters packed the meeting to urge commissioners to impose stricter rules on data centers coming into the county. Others in the audience sought a complete ban.

At the meeting, the planning commission voted to recommend that the Utah County Commission approve a proposed ordinance setting rules for where data centers can be built and what requirements they must meet. The county commission will make the final call at a later meeting.

“Data centers are like landfills: Nobody likes them near them, but we all use them,” said board member Seth Cox. “Anybody who uses a cellphone is using them. The point of this ordinance is to protect our residents.”

That last sentence drew a loud, derisive laugh from someone in the audience. The unanimous roll-call vote followed, and board chair Shayne Pierce then directed deputies to remove someone — apparently Azalea — from the audience.

Earlier in the hearing, Pierce said the ordinance sets some limits on data center development for unincorporated parts of Utah County that didn’t exist before.

“We didn’t have clear defined ordinance or zoning requirements to get permitted to build a data center in Utah County,” Pierce said. “They would have just looked at the zoning that most closely matched and tried to get a permit, basically without any rules.”

The proposed ordinance would cap data centers at 300,000 gallons of water a year for their cooling systems. That is slightly more than what two Utah County households use in a year.

Also, under the ordinance, data centers could not drain and refill a closed-loop cooling system more than once every five years unless the county approves an earlier refill for an emergency.

It would also require studies of nearby wells and potential water impacts, and mandate monitoring every six months for the first two years.

A data center applicant would also need to study low-frequency noise and include any needed noise-reduction measures in project plans. The applicant must also assess the project’s potential affects on traffic and roads.

If a proposed project would draw power from the grid, the applicant would need to pay for any power-system upgrades and show that the project won’t raise costs for other utility customers.

The proposal would expand public notice and comment opportunities and limit where data centers can be built, with the largest projects capped at 500 megawatts and 1 million square feet. County commissioners could also decide case by case whether to require development agreements.