Many thanks to those kind readers who have kicked in this holiday season! My Paypal account is at Darksydothemoon-at-aol and I’ll be headlining here all month …
The video below is hard to watch. It starts out gritty and routine, like an episode of COPS, with dashboard camera showing a couple of policemen trying to make heads or tails of domestic dispute that appears to have spilled out of a nearby house and into the street. For whatever reason one cop decides the wife needs to go to jail. He’s shoving her in the backseat of a patrol car, handcuffed, and it’s hard to see but she allegedly kicks him. What’s not hard to see, he loses his temper in an instant and decks the absolute living shit out of her. She goes down, hard, and later turns out to have a broken eye socket. It looks like he could have killed her with that punch.
I’m no expert, I don’t know the context or background of either party, I can’t say with conviction he should never ever be a cop again or do twenty years for attempted murder, both of which have been suggested elsewhere. This was not planned, cops are human, he didn’t start it and I give him the benefit of the doubt that something happened to cause him to snap like that. But goddamn, she was in handcuffs and he outweighs her by about a 100 pounds of muscle. That seems excessive.
More evidence that cops are just pea-brained thugs and bullies who joined the force in order to ‘stomp some ass.’ If a suspect is resisting, a cop has some right to protect themselves, but this is clear thuggery where the bully, pissed off that he was ‘disrespected’ dishes out some damage. It’s not like the guy was possibly in any danger. This is purely his fragile little status based ego at work.
And now the video and account are gone
I replaced it
Could have killed her? Really? you sure you want to go there?
The received wisdom from this crowd is that she really has nothing to fear … as we all know being punched by someone with up to seventy pounds on you can in no way be thought of as potentially life threatening so there was clearly no serious risk.
Medical science or consistency, pick one.
I expect that people in any job can make mistakes. It happens. The myth that medical personnel, cops, politicians, lawyers, customer service people, or any other working person you care to name has to be perfect all the time is just ridiculous. I don’t make mistakes often but they happen and I don’t think I’m the only person with a special pass to do that and walk away.
That said, mistakes have real consequences. I don’t think any job group should have a get out of jail free card for this. And it really shouldn’t be the seeminly automatic pass that seems to happen with law enforcement whether they’re cops like this or the FBI.
People in all jobs make mistakes. Like being a few minutes late, or getting an order wrong, or maybe adding a few numbers incorrectly. Punching someone who is not a threat is not a ‘mistake’ it’s a deliberate crime. As in if someone who was not a cop did that, it’s a crime.
Law enforcement is not accountable to the public and gets offended that the public has the audacity to demand accountability.