“Well, part of the responsibility for this lies with whoever called the police in the first place.”
If you read the Hufpo report posted by saintfan, the call was justified - apparently, there was an adult white female behaving aggressively towards the kids and even punching another woman in the face. If what the witnesses reported is true, she was out of control and needed to be dealt with. However, either the caller omitted these details or the cops themselves decided to go after the kids. Do our law enforcement officers get any training in de-escalation techniques?! What happened is just horrible. That poor girl is likely severely traumatized (I would be!) by this experience.
That’s the problem, a call is made, police arrive to a crowd of various ethnic backgrounds, blacks are always assumed to be the guilty party and are treated differently. The video shows a few of the young men trying to give the cop aka Paul blart, his flashlight back and they were treated like dogs.
Out of control officer. Plain and simple. Who can defend this cop and say his actions were 100% justified even with the blatant bias smack dab in their face?
I’m surprised the rogue cop apologists haven’t reared their heads here. Perhaps they haven’t read the correct blogs yet that explain why the young Black teen(s) were in the wrong. 8-}
Look, I know cops have stressful jobs. I totally get that. But you’re trained to deal with that and use force ONLY when appropriate. If you can’t handle that, you shouldn’t be a cop.
This was disgusting. I hope the family sues the living daylights out of them.
I hope cameras force a change in police training and thus behavior. The news showed another video from late last week taken from an apartment building of a black guy lying on the ground and a big white cop repeatedly kicking him as hard as he could. That’s criminal. By contrast, I just posted in another thread the Boston Globe’s story about the video of the police shooting of Usaama Rahim in which they say the police were backing away from him and he kept coming towards them. I mention this for a few reasons:
In this region, people won't accept the degree of police brutality that other parts of the country apparently do. There was a massive outcry when footage came out of a police officer assaulting a suspect in the corridor of a police station in NH - and the footage was 2 years old before it leaked out. The regional/local culture is where the problem lies: if you don't expect better behavior, if you excuse bad behavior, then you get bad behavior. The oddity is people say exactly this kind of thing about children and can't extend the very same idea to adults.
There are many allegations of police misconduct. Some are true and others become absurd. As in the Rahim case, people shifted from claiming he was shot in the back (while on the phone with his father) to saying they should have done something other than kill him. I think the line becomes fairly clear when you look at this case: the guy actually had a large knife (the video shows an officer picking it up after the shooting), not a presumed weapon (as in the case where a black guy lifts his hand out of his waistband and is shot because the officer somehow thinks he maybe just might possibly have a gun) and the police aren't the physical aggressor (so there is no question of confusion or self-defense by a surprised person).
I know the police in my town - which has about 60,000 people and is surrounded by Boston - want bad cops gone. Period. That's generally true. But as the video of the cop kicking a man while he's down shows, officers tend not to interfere with other officers. They may resent what the other guy does. They may talk about it with other officers but the guys in blue have a weird code that tends to make them relatively passive when other guys in blue cross lines. That is something that needs to be trained away.
The scary part is this has happened in a middle class community where residents are expected to live in harmony and peacefully. One has to wonder how the people who live in disadvantaged community must feel! The attitude of the cop is not a coincidence. And, obviously, cops no longer care if their actions are in broad daylight and filmed by smartphones.
The biggest tragedy is that such incidents are bound to be distorted by groups that feast on them, and this from both sides of alley.
Can’t wait to hear Casebolt’s explanation of why he rolled across the ground like TV lawman T.J. Hooker. Is that part of his training…melodramatic maneuvers intended to intimidate the enemy? Guffaw!!!
It’s not that it’s “so special”, but that there’s no amount of manicured lawns and neatly bricked houses that prevent racist acts against one’s neighbors.
The above is applicable to every community in the country. Yet, your earlier post stated that you were not shocked that this happened in McKinney, Texas! Why make a generic and gratuitous post if you wanted to make a point?