Driving while black, diabetic and hypoglycemic will get your window broken, your seat belt cut, seven shocks from a Taser, a dislocated elbow, and a felony arrest, even after the cops realize the reason for your behavior. The video is horrific.
Just Awful
by @heymistermix.com| 34 Comments
This post is in: Shitty Cops
The Sheriff's A Ni-
I am shocked, shocked, that a black man is beaten in
CincituckyHamilton County.Mnemosyne
Unfortunately, this happens all the time. Not just to diabetics, but to epileptics. And that’s leaving aside the mentally ill people who get Tased.
Cops use the Taser to get people to comply with their instructions. Unfortunately, someone in the middle of a seizure or heading towards a diabetic coma is literally unable to comply, so they get it worse than anyone else.
Frankly, I’m surprised the deputies were even punished. Usually the department finds that the beating was within departmental guidelines and they get off scott free.
MikeJ
After the cops beat you, they’re going to arrest you. It doesn’t matter if Jeebus himself comes down from heaven to say what a swell guy you are, you’re going to jail.
ppcli
“Frankly, I’m surprised the deputies were even punished. Usually the department finds that the beating was within departmental guidelines and they get off scott free.”
What made the difference here was that it was witnessed, videotaped, and immediately reported by an officer from a different, and evidently more professional, police force.
And even so, the deputies are still on duty, just in a different district.
Cermet
But thank god we amerikans are safe from the deadly effects of drugs that would do no harm even if used in large amounts and aren’t very addictive (unlike tobacco or alcohol or all the legal prescriptions that people with money can legally buy) or the trade off of all our rights, our fear of being robbed by drug users needing money to pay for habbits (rather than treatment that would cost little compared to prision) or the vast illegal drug gangs/mafia system that depends on the vast income of the trade or that cops that can storm into our homes, kill pets, taze people, bind and brutalize the people and when it turns out they are wrong, then tough luck – you are safe from enjoying safe drugs (unlike tobacco that kills over 400 K/year) and lose all your rights. Hell, next some terrorist will kill the same number of people who die from MD mistakes over less than two weeks and we’ll give away all our remaining rights and change our country into a sick police state … wait, been there, done that.
El Cid
He was clearly asking for it.
unabogie
Ok, explain why these assholes aren’t looking at jail time?
joe from Lowell
This was a bad stop from the beginning. They pulled the car over, the driver pulled over, and the officer approaches the car with a gun drawn, screaming?
This wasn’t people panicking in the midst of a situation; the cops’ behavior created the situation.
J. Michael Neal
@ppcli:
It has been my experience here in Minnesota, and people I’ve talked to in other locations, that state police forces are far more professional than most local cops. Every time I have dealt with the Minnesota State Patrol, I have come away impressed. Granted, I’m white, so I may not see the whole story, but I’d be somewhat surprised if there was a systemic problem.
Other cops don’t really like them, because, just like the Ohio State guy here, they have a reputation for ticketing and, in some cases, testifying against police officers.
The Disgruntled Chemist
@unabogie: You’re kidding, right?
conumbdrum
The Taser is the best friend racist cops have had since the demise of Jim Crow — and it’ll be a cold day in hell before you’ll see a wingnut complain about their use. At least until one of their own gets zapped, and what are the odds of that ever happening?
Maybe if Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas got tased, we’d see a modicum of ire from right-wing pundits. Be the first time they ever called a white cop racist, I’ll wager.
conumbdrum
An ex-cop explained it to me once:
If you get charged with “disorderly conduct,” that translates as “You pissed a cop off.”
If you get charged with “resisting arrest,” that translates as “You pissed a cop off, and he beat the shit out of you.”
hamletta
@conumbdrum: Thomas’s nephew got tazed, IIRC. Didn’t help none.
hamletta
The video is horrific, indeed. The story is heartbreaking, especially then end, where this big, strong man drops his head in his hands and cries.
Brutusettu
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
When I first saw it was in Cincinnati, I guessed it happened in Norwood, well I was wrong, right county though.
Breathing while black down there can be dangerous.
unabogie
@The Disgruntled Chemist:
If by kidding you mean crying in disgust, then yeah, I’m kidding.
sherifffruitfly
In before a bunch of good, clean non-racist white folks babble about how “it’s not race, it’s class”.
different church-lady
The fact that any cops anywhere would think that’s the appropriate way to react to a drunk driver should be all of our concerns.
The fact that it’s more likely to happen if you’re black should also be all of our concerns.
Mnemosyne
@ppcli:
@J. Michael Neal:
I’ve noticed before that these kinds of stories rarely come from highway patrol cops. I sometimes wonder if that’s because they have a lot more interaction with normal people (helping motorists who broke down, accident victims, etc.) than regular cops do, so they tend not to have the mentality that every person in a car is a wanted criminal who is planning to kill them.
Mnemosyne
@sherifffruitfly:
I think it would be fair to say that this demonstrates the fact that our class system is based on race. Here you have a nice, middle-class black man coming home from his office, but the cop sees a crack dealer because, in our society, black = lower class.
When race meets class, it’s always ugly. There was a case here in Los Angeles about 10 years ago where a visiting neurosurgeon was dragged from his car during a traffic stop and handcuffed so tightly that he suffered permanent nerve damage. Because, of course, if that black man tells you he’s a doctor in town for a medical conference, he must be lying. I mean, just look at him!
gelfling545
Back in the day when one was automatically, if male, drafted into the military I had a friend who believed that people should also be drafted into law enforcement. He believed that 20+ years was too long for a person to be in a position in which most or all of their dealings with their fellow humans were essentially adversarial and that it would be ultimately damaging to the officer as well as society. The longer I live, the more I think he was right.
J. Michael Neal
@Mnemosyne: Some guesses as to why you don’t see these from highway cops so much:
1) There are a lot fewer of them, so you’re going to see a lot less of everything from them.
2) Regular cops spend plenty of time helping people as well, so it’s not that. It may, though, be that because they don’t patrol neighborhoods or deal as much with the drug trade, they’re just not as reflexively suspicious as city cops.
3) The level of training at the state level is just a lot higher than it is at the city level.
4) Particularly relative to suburban cops, there’s less of a sense that black people are outsiders and don’t belong there, since their district is the whole state.
5) The type of personality that wants to be a city cop is different from one that wants to be a highway patrolman. The former wants to be an authority figure and tell people what to do. The latter wants to drive really fast.
My guess is that it’s all of them, but #3 is particularly important.
Donut
Digby has been (sadly) cataloging cases like this for years at Hullabaloo. That this one has a racial component makes it all that more egregious – and not to detract from that in any way – but really, this is happening to all kinds of people. Grandmas. Little kids. Mentally disabled people. It’s epidemic.
Merrily we roll along the road to a more perfect totalitarian society.
Happy 2011.
Donut
As I was saying…
Murc
Every time I get really shit fed up with Radley Balko’s economic and social illiteracy, I read a story like this and get an impulse to donate to him and tell him to keep shining a light on these fuckers.
El Tiburon
Tasers are not racist. Cops, many of them, are pigs, pure and simple.
Short man, authoritarian facist assholes.
Yet, as a society, we accept and in many cases applaud this torture technique on grandmothers, the mentally challenged, and assholes.
Proud to be an American.
Fuckers.
de stijl
@Murc:
Spot on, Murc.
Balko does a man’s job on this type of stuff. More than a man’s job actually; he got Corey Maye a new trial. Hell, he’s a god-damned hero.
My best advice is to just try to ignore the glibertarian nonsense on The Agitator and just focus on the cops-gone-wilding posts.
Bella Q
Just so you know, these were Hamilton County deputies, not Cincinnati city cops. The county deputies are lower paid than, and generally, not as well trained as, the officers in the city. These folks were clearly examples of among the worst Si’s force has to offer.
There is no excuse, zip, nada and zero, for approaching a car stopped simply for weaving with a weapon drawn. It’s probably going to make a bad situation worse if there are open wants attached to the tag, but in this situation it is inexcusable. It will require a large payment on the part of the county, and it should. It’s a shandah.
Triassic Sands
One thing that often strikes me as strange in these videos — and there seem to be enough of them out there — is the apparent expectation of cops that people who are being tased are in a position to “do as they are told.” I would think that when people are getting the shit shocked out them, following orders isn’t all that easy. Are people even aware they’re being told to do things? How many of you have been in extreme pain? Was your first priority listening to and following orders? I doubt it. Especially when, if you failed to comply with one order, you were immediately tased again.
It’s time for some serious training and re-training concerning the use of these dangerous, sometimes deadly weapons.
goatchowder
“Particularly relative to suburban cops, there’s less of a sense that black people are outsiders and don’t belong there, since their district is the whole state”
Yeah, that’s my vote right there.
State cops do indeed deal with people of all walks of life, all classes, all races, all colors. They are not as likely to get white-blindness.
And city cops are generally way cooler, more professional, less egotistical, and much less panicky. They see real crime every day.
Suburban cops are there to defend the NIMBY white rich taxpayers from “those people”.
By the way, I consider LAPD to be suburban cops, since LA is basically one giant suburb.
Lupin
They sure envy us for our freedoms.
tPirate
In November I bungee-jumped from the bridge over the Zambesi River at Victoria Falls, but I cannot make myself go and watch that video. I rarely use this word, but I hate the way tasers are over-used. I like to mouth off to authority and expect that my death could well come from being tased someday.
JenJen
Horrifying. The audio is unbearable. I know exactly where it happened, too. The accompanying article where the victim describes why he and his wife moved out to Anderson breaks my heart… why should anyone have to explain why they moved somewhere?
If there’s one bright spot in this madness, it’s Trooper Sanger. But that’s it. Just abominable.
ETA: I didn’t see a comments section attached to the linked article, but if there is one, just look away. The Cincinnati Enquirer comments section is pretty f’n depressing in its own right. Straight overrun by bigots, teabaggers, and jackholes.
StarkyLuv
One thing my white brothers and sisters will NEVER understand, now matter how much they try is how much anxiety there is amongst darker-skinned minorities (Asians tend to not experience this) when law enforcement happens upon them. There is NO sense of “feeling safer”. You feel exponentially LESS safe.
Even if you call the cops for aide, there’s a I high chance that upon arrival, you yourself will be mistaken for a criminal. You’ll never know how that feels.