Justin Miller, left, and L. Chris Stewart of Stewart Trial Attorneys.

Criminal assault charges filed in Atlanta on Tuesday against police officers for yanking college students out of their car, tasing them and slamming them onto the pavement—caught on live television—offer the clue to finding justice and calming the unrest in cities around the country, according to lawyers for the victims.

"It's really important. It's just an example of accountability," L. Chris Stewart of Stewart Trial Attorneys in Atlanta told the Daily Report on Tuesday. "If officers knew that tasing somebody or beating up somebody not only was going to get them fired, but also possibly arrested, all this nonsense would stop."

Stewart and his partner Justin Miller represent Taniyah Pilgrim, the 20-year-old Spelman College student who was pulled from her car, tased, slammed onto the ground, handcuffed and held for three hours in a police van with other women and denied COVID-19 protective masks, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.

Stewart and Miller are working with civil rights attorney Mawuli Mel Davis of the Davis Bozeman Law Firm in Decatur, who is representing 22-year-old Morehouse College student Messiah Young. Young was Pilgrim's date for the night of May 30 when the two were caught in the protest traffic as they were going out for something to eat, according to their attorneys and the district attorney. Young also suffered a broken arm, 23 stitches and a night in jail, Howard said.

"They were extremely innocent—almost to the point of being naive," Howard said of the two students in announcing during a live streamed news conference that he was arresting six police officers. "They were two of the nicest people we've ever had the opportunity to meet in the DA's office."

Those indictments against the police officers included charges for: aggravated assault, simple battery, destruction of property (for smashing Pilgrim's car windows) and pointing a weapon at a person.

Howard said the reason he was able to bring the charges is that the entire incident was caught on video—from a television station and police body cameras. Often in such cases, no video is available and the victims are dead, the district attorney said.

Video—often recorded on smartphones—has become the star witness in a string of assaults and killings by police officers or their surrogates. Stewart has represented many of the families of those victims. He and Miller said people are wrong if they think such events are happening more often. They're just being documented more often.

"History is not moving backwards. Technology is moving forward," Miller said.

Stewart and Miller said they generally support police—just not police abuse.

"We don't have an issue with the police generally," Miller said. "But the issue that society was seeing is that when you don't balance the scales at all, when cops can do anything with impunity, that causes all this inequality and it causes all this pent up aggression that we've been seeing as well. Something has to change with the police or else it's going to continue."

Stewart and Miller are also part of the legal team representing the families of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in Brunswick, and George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis. They are working with Ben Crump and S. Lee Merritt for those families, as well as the family of Breonna Taylor, who was shot multiple times in her own bed when police broke into her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment by mistake with a no-knock warrant.

Stewart and Miller spoke as they were landing in Minneapolis and heading to a news conference where they are still calling for arrests of the officers who stood by as their colleague pressed his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. Their client there is a 6-year-old girl who no longer has a father.