And the sick thing is, the reason the cops showed up is because some racist middle-aged white ladies were starting shit. Were they thrown to the ground?
Nope. In my personal experience as a (youthful!) middle-aged white lady, we do not often get thrown to the ground for starting shit. (We are generally not presumed to be starting said shit.) Casebolt seems to have said something about being furious to have hauled ass out there with thirty pounds of gear unnecessarily. I don't even know who told him he needed to haul thirty pounds of gear out there. Maybe he could have come out, calmed shit down and talked to people instead of getting his tactical face on.
All I really know for sure is--there is no situation where sitting on an unarmed and half-dressed teenage girl is okay. It does seem like other people on the scene were also being stupid, but this is the guy who is on camera actually sitting on a girl. I am really not seeing where there is a present danger where that girl needs to be face-down and handled like that.
I know some people will talk about why did some of these teenagers run? Let's not be stupid--run from what? They didn't torch a liquor store or leave a trail of bodies in their wake. They were kids at a swim party and being kids, didn't want to be in trouble and for some reason, brown and black kids think the presence of cops means trouble. To a kid mind, if you outrun "tag", you aren't "it".
This whole scene is a special kind of stupid. But for the adults who mishandled it, the stupid is mostly on them.
2 comments:
Hi Vixen, interestingly enough I have some familiarity with McKinney.
The important point here is that this neighborhood is basically an example of what we would all like to see integrated neighborhoods become.
The average home is probably $275,000-$300,000 and it is a successful suburb of Dallas where prosperous, multicultural middle class people move to enjoy a quality of life.
The black, white, and Hispanic citizens of this town are largely educated, and frankly get along in a friendly fashion. The kids grow up going to school with each other and enjoying friendships that do not get into the vicissitudes created in some areas.
This is not some northeastern city with drawn battle lines between the races.
It is possible that this police officer went over the line, but we will have to wait for an investigation to draw a conclusion. As someone interested in hand to hand combat, you might be relieved to know that placing a knee on the suspect's back is a preventive measure to keep the prep from suddenly jumping up and attacking you or going for your weapon. Crouching over the suspect allows you to place your knee on the back with various levels of pressure starting from a very small amount of pressure but with the potential of escalating to full weight if necessary. It appeared to me that the officer had just enough pressure on the girl's back to give him a feeling of having control of her in case she suddenly had aspirations of leaping up again.
Most of the citizens of this community, white and black, understand why the police department moved in to quell the trouble that occurred when uninvited guests from outside the neighborhood crashed the party. (Kids in the area say that the real culprit was a DJ who publicized this private event and drew crowds from rougher neighborhoods.)
the important thing here is that when you discover one of the many places that are part of the solution to racial problems, you do not want to try and deconstruct them to be part of the problem. All over this country there are successfully integrated suburban neighborhoods where people work and play together and get along. This is the objective. If all of our neighborhoods were like this one in McKinney, agitators would have to pack up and get another gig.
Parenthetically speaking, if people look at this and see violence, they have never actually been exposed to real violence. When I grew up there were gang fights after every football game. People used chains, sticks, packs, and switchblades. Packs were frequent, that is, a bolt or roll of dimes or quarters that turns the fist into one half of brass knuckles, which were also used. Not everyone participated, of course, but this kind of activity was commonplace in my youth. The rowdiness of McKinney scarcely descends to the level of real violence.
Looks like a heck of a nice area from the video--I think that's one of the reasons the kids from that area were unnerved: they probably don't have regular bad interactions with law enforcement. (It's true enough that, race aside, you get kids from mixed neighborhoods in my city in one area and they can give police a real reason to come out.) Even the protests have been, well, nice.
I still think his handling of that girl was a bit much though--he resigned, so he might have thought that too. It was a man-sized physical solution for a teenage girl-sized problem. I do see he's more like crouching than sitting, but the danger in having a prone juvenile on the ground is that applying too much pressure can go badly (neck and chest injuries). And I don't know how likely the young lady would have been to take a poke at him--it seemed she really just wanted someone to call her parents. Maybe if someone's swinging or seems high that kind of force is useful, in her case, it seemed out of line.
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