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February 14, 2012 at 9:58 am 
Ed Brayton Here’s an appalling video of police brutality in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. Police pull over a car that is weaving, pull the guy out of the car and beat the hell out of him while yelling at him to “stop resisting” when he wasn’t resisting at all.
Adam Greene is on his stomach as a pack of police officers pile on him, driving their knees into his back and wrenching his arms and legs. One officer knees him in the ribs; another kicks him in the face.
“Stop resisting,” officers on the video yell, but Greene, his face pushed into the pavement, hasn’t resisted. He doesn’t even move — maybe can’t move — because he’s gone into diabetic shock caused by low blood sugar…
A Highway Patrol trooper enters the scene first, gun drawn, and kicks the driver’s window of Greene’s four-door sedan. After several moments, the trooper opens the door.
The trooper, his gun still raised, then gives Greene conflicting commands. He first tells him not to move, then tells him to come forward.
A second trooper quickly cuffs Greene’s wrist and pulls him from the car, which rolls forward until an officer stops it.
Greene flops to the ground, clearly dazed as five officers rush him. A sixth officer, with Henderson police, enters the frame late and delivers five well-placed kicks to Greene’s face.
“Stop resisting mother (expletive)!” one officer yells.
Greene doesn’t scream until a second Henderson officer knees him in the midsection — and then does it three more times. Greene was later treated for fractured ribs.
After they’d kicked him in the face and the chest and broken his ribs, they found insulin in his pocket and realized that he wasn’t drunk, he was in shock. They then called for an ambulance. And laughed about it. The video is sickening.
Balko makes a few points about the situation:
Not only were none of these cops criminally charged, every one of them is apparently still protecting and serving the public. The story indicates one seargeant was “disciplined,” but we aren’t allowed to know what that discipline was. The department also claims to have changed some policies in response to the incident. But we aren’t allowed to know exactly what those changes are, either.
We also aren’t allowed to know the names of any of the officers in the video. This is inexcusable. It seems pretty clear that there’s a culture problem, here. Mistaking a diabetic for a drunk is bad enough. Beating him senseless when he clearly posed no threat is criminal. And yelling “Stop Resisting!” at a man who is clearly not resisting is indicative of a police culture in which excessive force is common enough that the officers know what to say as they’re beating someone to give them cover later. Laughing after you’ve just beaten a man, and after you’ve just discovered he was a diabetic is straight-up pathological. All of which means there’s plenty of reason to doubt this particular department’s internal review process. These officers names need to be released, so journalists and police watchdog groups outside of law enforcement can look into their histories on the job.
Greene and his family were given a $292,500 settlement, which of course will be funded by taxpayers, not the cops who beat him senseless. This too needs to change. The cops who beat green should be forfeiting a portion of their paychecks to him for the rest of their lives. And those paychecks should preferably be compensation for work other than police work.
I agree completely. That is what would happen if this was done by anyone other than cops. They should be fired and facing criminal charges for assault.
Posted in 
Just some more of that new police professionalism that scumbag fascist Scalia likes to talk about.
HENDERSON!
Ə – Yes, that’s correct, Henderson, Nevada. Just like it says in Ed’s lead.
Dingo
I don’t know how many civilized cops are fighting against this sort of behavior, but they need to step it up – even if they are from different jurisdictions. After an encounter like this, or after a relative’s or friend’s encounter like this, decent people may react violently to an encounter with a decent cop. Or at least be passive-aggressively unhelpful.
Are we trying to train our non-criminals to refuse to cooperate with authorities? TSA, zero-tolerance in schools, abusive cops, catch-22 bureaucracies, all seemed determined to undermine the social interactions necessary for a prosperous and civil society.
I get so upset seeing videos like these. I know they’re out there, and we need to fight against these kinds of bullies who wear badges.
That said, I also like to recount the interactions I’ve had with the police – always professional, often friendly. A patrol car is often getting gas during my daily walks, and I share a friendly smile and a wave with the officer, because I know some people think all police are like the ones in this video. We had our alarm go off at my office last year, and the officer who responded was direct, to the point, but also friendly – he and I were chatting about video games as we examined the facility to make sure it really was just a failure of the alarm and not a break-in. Even when I got pulled over (failure to use a turn signal soon enough, apparently), I got in a talk with the officer about my custom license plate by the end of our interaction.
Again, we need to fight against these beatings and abuses of power. But not all officers are like that, and we need to remember that the others are out there. And work to get rid of those like the ones we see here.
Makoto:
Not me. I’ve had several encounters with police where they used violence inappropriately in the exact manner that creates a stereotype that some cops are power-hungry assholes looking to leverage the power of the job to bully others.
@Michael – I’m sorry you’ve had those kinds of interactions. That’s why we need to work to get rid of those power hungry abusive types. My point was that they’re not all like that, which seems to be forgotten sometimes.
Hopefully you can interact with the better types at some point. Those that are police to actually help people, not just those that wear a badge so they can beat up on others, which I know some do. The college I went to had one of the biggest criminal justice departments in the region, so I saw a lot of wannabe abusers there. I was fortunate to leave the area before any of them graduated and could pull me over.
Makoto writes:
Of course there are delusional idiots who refer to all cops based on the worst of them, but depending on this as an argument is a strawman. So I strongly disagree reasonable people forget the police are not all bad. And, these good cops do deserve our criticism. Precisely because they effectively support or at least enable their unions and local political power structures to defend bad cops and deny justice rather than seek to optimize the professionalism of their collective service by prosecuting the criminal and unethical behavior of those who demonstrate such behavior.
The good cops are culpable as well and remain so until they too start demanding at least equal justice under the law. I would prefer to see cops lobby for a higher standard than equal justice since they are professionals, just like we demand a higher standard from other professions to events directly related to their jobs.
They probably don’t really know why they did what they did. They would be exceptional if any of them could even admit to themselves that they did something wrong, even after watching the video. I bet they still divide the world into good guys and bad guys and, in their own minds, they are still unequivocally the good guys.
And when the internal tribal warfare switch is thrown, scruples are replaced by savagery. Without vigorous oversight and accountability, groups with power and a strong tribal identity inevitably turn savage in their conduct.
Re Michael Heath @ #6
Hey, maybe Heath looks like a thug to the cops (just kidding).
In regards to
and
Would a freedom of information act/law request get this information or are police departments allowed to deny such request?
WTF? This video contains graphic scenes of literal torture, but we need to be warned that the LANGUAGE might be offensive?!
slc1:
Actually the worst instance of violence I encountered was done to a person I was holding after catching him stealing in my dad’s supermarket when I was in my early-20s. We got into a knock-down drag-out fight in the store that went outside behind it. I caught hundreds of shoplifters during that period where this was the only one that got violent. A call to the police went out while we were fighting. But by the time the cops got there the thief was subdued and quiet.
So there was no reason for the cop to throw him on the pavement face-first, hard. And then put his night stick under the guy’s chin and yanked him backwards extremely hard to the point I thought he was going to crush the guy’s windpipe.
I found out later this guy had been stealing cars and taking them out in the woods and setting them on fire, four of them. He was mentally ill.
I see the issue as similar to that of the abuse in the Catholic Church. Individual or groups of abusers are responsible for their own actions. The hirarchy and the cupture of the organization comes into question when there these indivisuals are not held accountablile for their actions.
Individual police officers may be decent or not, but the culture of protection for those who break the law is the bigger problem.
Maybe the good cops are AFRAID to speak out against the bad ones. They can’t help but notice when bad cops get away with all this stuff scot-free, so how are they supposed to know who they can trust or who will protect them if they speak out against the bad cops? Even if they think they can still be tough enough to protect themselves, they’ve got family and friends — not to mention a long-term career to think about. They’ve got a lot on the line, and they’re extremely vulnerable. Even anonymous complaints can be hard to make sure stay anonymous.
The bad cops may still be a minority, but if they are numerous enough and sufficiently feared/intimidated by virtually everyone else involved with the police force, then I have a hard time seeing how the good ones can even begin to try to turn things around, ESPECIALLY since the bad cops show a ready willingness to use force (perhaps even lethal force; let’s not forget that they all carry guns) and generally have no reason to fear consequences for using it — even on one of their own.
~David D.G.
Oh god, I think I’m going to be sick. Indirectly, I believe I know one of those officers. Guy’s the husband of a good friend of mine in Henderson. Heard he had gotten in trouble over something early last year, but never heard exactly what. If this is him, fuck… I wonder if my friend’s seen this video, and how it lines up with what he told her?
Cops in southern Nevada are scary. Only thing about living in Vegas that truly frightened me was them.