Yet another example of police brutality in response to being recorded abusing a citizen — even though their own police chief agrees that recording the police is legally protected in Philadelphia. After two people witnessed the police slamming someone’s head into a car, they started recording what was going on. And then:
Riley had started to walk away when at least five baton-wielding cops followed him, he said, and they beat him, poured a soda on his face and stomped on his phone, destroying the video he had just taken.
Meanwhile, two officers approached Hurling, urged her to leave and, after exchanging a few words, slammed her against a police cruiser, Hurling said. They pulled her by her hair before tossing her into the back of a cop car, she said.
They were charged with that all-purpose catch-all crime, disorderly conduct.
Although it’s legal to record Philadelphia police performing official duties in public, all three were charged with disorderly conduct and related offenses, and officers destroyed Hurling and Riley’s cellphones, erasing any record of Medley’s violent arrest, the pair said.
Charges against Hurling and Riley were dismissed, but Medley was found guilty last month of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, harassment and related offenses. She was fined $500 but has filed an appeal.
Echoes of the incident, which was corroborated by a half-dozen witnesses, have been reverberating nationwide in recent years as the combination of cellphone video and police officers has simmered into what is an increasingly explosive formula. A growing number of bystanders have been misled, arrested or worse for using their cellphones to record what they perceive as excessive force by cops making arrests, watchdogs say.
“I grew up in the neighborhood and I saw stuff go down but it never happened to me,” Riley said recently, adding that he did nothing wrong. “They stomped my phone and said it was a federal offense.”
And we get the standard response from the police officers’ attorneys:
Some police officials argue that people who attempt to record often impede an investigation.
“It’s a recipe for disaster. We have people getting in the way of an investigation,” said John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. “They have their right to tape, [but people have] to be mindful that officers are out there conducting an investigation. The safety of the officer is pertinent.”
If you can find a single example of someone recording the police affecting the safety of a police officer, I’d love to hear it. It’s the safety of those doing the recording that always seems to be in jeopardy — and always from the police officer.
And police officials caution that any video shows only part of the story, usually leaving out what led up to a contentious arrest, as was the case when a news helicopter filmed the violent arrest of three suspects in Feltonville in 2008.
“With the video footage law enforcement receive at times, they don’t get the full, complete incident,” said police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers. “Things happen before and after. With video, it is what it is and the chips fall where they may.”
If a video shows the police abusing someone, it simply doesn’t matter what preceded it. Even if someone assaults a police officer, that doesn’t mean the officer gets to assault him back. They can do what is necessary to subdue the suspect and arrest them; they cannot then beat on them once they’ve got them in cuffs, which happens routinely.
In case you don’t understand the reference in the title, here is Justice Scalia from a 2006 court ruling where he argued that we don’t need to worry about safeguards against the police not violating someone’s rights, because the police are just so well-trained and professional these days:
Another development over the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline. Even as long ago as 1989, we felt it proper to “assume” that unlawful police behavior “would be dealt with appropriately” by the authorities, but we now have increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously. There have been “wide ranging reforms in the education, training, and supervision” of police officers (cite omitted). [...]
Moreover, modern police forces are staffed with professionals; it is not credible to assert that internal discipline, which can limit successful careers, will not have a deterrent effect. There is also evidence that the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability.
Talk about living in a dream world.
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Dr X
September 9, 2011 at 10:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And police officials caution that any stand alone confession video shows only part of the story, usually leaving out what led up to
a contentious arrest tothe forced confession.FTFY
Blondin
September 9, 2011 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The PA police should just do what the police do in Ontario – just take off their name tags. Let citizens film them wailing on a perp. Who cares? No one can identify the cops in the video anyway.
Aquaria
September 9, 2011 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is the same kind of stupidity that one of Henry Bonilla’s legislative douchebags vomited up when a group of us warned that American troops would be doing awful things in Iraq, that it was war, it was bound to happen, they’d be scared, pain. And this was a conversation that took place before the invasion.
Nope, our soldiers are professionals and would “never” do anything illegal or immoral, so sayeth the idiot.
Right.
I wonder if that conversation played in that scumbag’s head when the Abu Ghraib photos came out.
Vicki, running low on patience
September 9, 2011 at 12:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And the one bit that Scalia got right is the one the police are doing their best to prevent:
lofgren
September 9, 2011 at 12:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“This boy Scalia says that citizen review might enhance our accountability. We’d better take care of that right away!”
Somebody needs to explain to this guy that “shooting video” is just a metaphor.
Michael Heath
September 9, 2011 at 12:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Aquaria:
It should be noted that while the police force doesn’t have any explicit orders to mistreat people – it’s instead in the nature of some cops to do so and for [most?] of their administrators to defend the bad eggs. The Abu Ghraib atrocities were in perfect alignment with the orders received from President Bush regarding the treatment of prisoners. So the police enable such behavior whereas President Bush ordered it, to some degree inadvertently due to his own incompetence [Bush was horrified at the treatment, not realizing his signed orders were no different than that treatment].
harold
September 9, 2011 at 12:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The old “lovable but bungling George W. Bush ‘didn’t understand’ what he was doing” routine.
It almost doesn’t matter. What happened happened.
However, the absurd claim that a man of documented well above average intelligence, with a lifetime record of using craft and guile (getting out of real military service, setting up companies that made no money but caused shareholders who desired political access to pay his bills, obtaining a do-nothing position in professional baseball, by credible accounts seeking an excuse to invade Iraq long before 9/11, making sure that his speech at Bob Jones U. wasn’t recorded, “soul searching” for a couple of weeks before a knee jerk payoff to the religious right in the form of the stem cell ban was enacted, etc, etc, etc) “didn’t know what he was doing” deserves to be countered.
No-one can read Bush’s mind, and as I stated, it almost doesn’t matter, but the rational conclusion is that he deliberately pursued exactly the policies he wanted to pursue.
The “lovable bumbling” BS seems to be driven by two factors –
1) It was the preferred BS of the “South Park Republicans” crowd during their now-apparently-forgotten nauseating Team America/That’s MY Bush “we’re pretending to make fun of Bush but we’re actually sucking up to him” phase.
2) I guess some people who are liberal or progressive are meek, mild-mannered, kindly, retiring sorts or something, and can’t accept that anyone could ever be callous or sadistic. That’s all very nice, but you have to face reality.
Unless presented with very, very, very strong evidence that GWB somehow generated policies that by a weird coincidence were the opposite of what he really wanted and ended up “horrifying” him, I’m going to make the most logical assumption – they he knew damn well what he was doing.
Michael Heath
September 9, 2011 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Harold,
My study of the Bush presidency was intense. I’m confident my position is the most parsimonious explanation given the evidence. And we do have evidence of his motivations based on the reported reactions that are part of the public record, where those reports are consistent across both reporters and their leads.
President Bush was an intellectually lazy man who was not interested in the details of how we conducted the capture, interrogation, and detainment of individuals. He signed off after quickie presentations by Cheney’s staff; technically they were also Bush’s reports but Cheney had them in dual-reporting schemes to increase the breadth of his power within the White House. Dick Cheney and especially his aide David Addington were intensely interested and can not swear-off a lack of foreknowledge.
harold
September 9, 2011 at 1:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael Heath -
First of all, clearly, we can’t read Bush’s mind, so we can only exchange opinions.
I certainly agree that Bush was intellectually lazy in some ways.
I have to balance that against the fact that he had to say he was horrified, against the fact that like-minded individuals recently cheered Rick Perry’s execution record, against Bush’s mockery of Karla Faye Tucker, against the fact that I encountered constant efforts to make excuses for Bush or pretend that his views or actions were not what they obviously were (especially during his first term), and of course, against the fact that he did the exact opposite of taking any real action to remedy the situation, instead making superficial changes and setting up low-ranking enlisted personnel as scapegoats.
To summarize, I have rational reasons for thinking that Bush (along with some other right wingers) may at times take pleasure in the thought of violence toward relatively helpless people, I have rational reason for perceiving a tendency to downplay the possibility of serious flaws in Bush’s character, and I have the obvious observation that the Bush administration most certainly did not respond to the Abu Grahib photos with reform efforts – instead they condemned the release of the photos, made grudging, symbolic changes, and made sure that similar activities could continue elsewhere. And declarations of “being horrified” are non-informative, as he would have had to say that either way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he was “grossed out” by the pictures and had a sincere reaction of purely physical disgust.
As for his being sincerely horrified by the human rights violations – I have to remain skeptical.
Of course, you may be right, but I’m far from convinced.
joshuawhite
September 9, 2011 at 2:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t suppose a “Film the Police Week” movement like the “Draw Muhammad Day” might be useful?
eric
September 9, 2011 at 4:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This bit, at least, the public can prevent without any cooperation from the police. I think there are apps for streaming video to remote storage sites, and if there aren’t, there should be.
Michael Heath
September 9, 2011 at 6:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Harold:
I never claimed or even insinuated we could, raising that avoids my central argument. I instead claimed we have reports on how these policies were developed and how President Bush reacted after seeing the photos. Those reports come from a wide variety of people close to the action with a consistent pattern which reconciles quite well.
This is what I’m basing my conclusions on where I perceive your’s to based on your personal perceptions of his past record which also doesn’t reference any ability to game-plan out down-side scenarios to strategic decisions; specifically and I quote you:
This argument has nothing to do with the relevant facts while also failing provide any circumstantial evidence he was a strategic enough thinker to prudently deploy policies while mitigating the downside rather than being shocked by what he wrought – which is what happened. In addition, your assertion that President bush, “. . . deliberately pursued exactly the policies he wanted to pursue.” is irrelevant when it comes to his reaction at abu Ghraib – abu Ghraib was an unintended result which none of the chief architects expected to happen.
Your belief Mr. Bush expected results like abu Ghraib also flies in the face of his record. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Bush presidency was the complete lack of game-planning in the White House. Instead Bush expected the White House’s position to be developed prior to his being pulled in to authorize those decisions, where proposals were to be one-pagers coupled to five minute arguments. The history of his White House shows those responsible for his policy development also disdained game-planning and those who favored it, that was a cultural aspect of his Administration which came from the top. His reported surprise and revulsion at the behavior at abu Ghraib is entirely consistent with his not game planning out the ramifications prior to authorizing a torture policy and entirely consistent with the rest of his record as president.
Therefore I find the George W. Bush in your head entirely unconvincing as history relative to the history of his presidency that’s been published to date.
tienda jabones
January 31, 2012 at 7:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
tienda jabones…
[...]New Professionalism Comes to Philadelphia | Dispatches from the Culture Wars[...]…