Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Police Brutality Litmus Test
Based on some of the information I can gather about what had happened, this particular cop strikes me as a likely roid-rager who had no business being a resource officer in a school, where his particular brand of excessive force is used on naughty kids as opposed to, I dunno, hulking out all over miscreants on the streets.
He could have broken that child's neck. I just watched this video over and over and thought, she has to have a neck injury or a back problem or something like that now. I don't know why no one ever nudged this problematic officer aside before and recommended he get his excessive-force-using self under control once warning signs he was going to throw a young girl around like a sack of flour emerged before he actually did that thing. Many workplaces have an employee hotline to connect them to services for getting counseling to work their shit out so they don't have an episode that results in nearly killing a child. I can't imagine this isn't true for police officers, but just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean that's not so.
But I have seen on cable news and on Twitter people who have watched this very graphic tossing of a girl and come up with reasons why she had it coming to her. That's my litmus test. He dialed it from "come with me" to "tossing a girl on the floor" in under a minute. If you can't think of any other way (or several other ways) he could have handled that, there's nothing I want to hear from you. Because that was clearly excessive.
Update: This girl was a recent orphan, living in foster care. And no time was taken at all to wonder if her "disturbing the school" wasn't stemming from her personal difficulties? That's just heartbreaking. How is "humanity" becoming so inhumane?
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2 comments:
**SIGH**
No, Vixen. Just no.
This is exactly who they are, this is what they do, this is how they percieve their place in society and their role in the community.
They use violence and power to make people sit down and shut up. More often than not, they are intimidating and silencing people with whom they disagree with, much more than they are protect icing the community....
We no longer get to request - let alone demand - a law enforcement agency that protects US. This is the 21st century, and the gangs protect themselves, and nothing in the compact at any point gives us any reason to believe we're safe from them....
I've got cops in my family, and while I've heard problematic things, I have to believe that the people who serve aren't all screwed up and thinking that throwing human beings like sacks of flour is okay. At least one of my semi-occasional commenters is a cop, and I don't think he'd agree with this mess.
We've got a stupid macho culture that has been protected for too long by prosecutors and judges who feel like they need to be on the side of that thin blue line mythos--but I can't accept that everyone who goes on the job gets wholly corrupted by the power trip. Because I don't know how we dismantle the whole thing and maintain a civil society.
I get you though--when I saw the massive disrespect of officers turning their backs at a funeral of one of their own to show their level of disrespect to Mayor DeBlasio in NYC--I felt nothing but contempt. That hasn't been the sole moment either--my city burned a handful of blocks just to eradicate some weirdo Black Nationalist Back to the land fuck-ups called MOVE. I watched that shit as a little girl and fumed inside with an idea that this wasn't even partway right, even if I didn't have a language for all the ways it wasn't. I have watched brutality, Rodney King to Tamir Rice--and have a lot of hate for a specious and lying system that justifies itself by sanctifying the violence against communities with a po'mouthing job of discussing their "danger".
But I have a distinct feeling that there are a lot of LE who want to do a good job, they've just not got the resources to contend with all the fuckheads they face. They are people who confront fucked up people on the regular, and it affects them. They aren't empowered to change the whole structure of their jobs, and don't make so much bank or have so much freedom to talk about the whole of their experiences freely. I can't have contempt for all of them. But I sure do for the open-weeping sores on the cop-body politic.
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