I had a beef with my good buddy Packratt at Injustice Everywhere.  He’s killing me.  And, he’s making me feel bad. I don’t care to feel bad, so naturally I took it out on him rather than admit that it’s entirely my fault. 

The problem was simple: He’s so far ahead of the curve, and produces so much information on police misconduct and abuse, that I can’t keep up with him.  Worse still, when I post about a story, I later learn that he had the story a month earlier than anyone else and I just failed to catch it.  Nobody likes to feel inadequate, and PR keeps making me feel that way.  I hate him for it.

In an act of generosity to his lessers, Packratt sent me a link to his latest post, The Week in Police Misconduct Video.  Now people like me tend to latch on to a particular video, dissect it, deconstruct it, and then do my best to explain how and why this reflects a failing of our society to address the harm we cause ourselves in an effort to highlight our faults and improve our condition. 

Packratt, by his efforts to collect and document the plague happening across our nation, doesn’t have the opportunity to treat each video with such detailed efforts.  There are just too many.  They come too quickly.  They become overwhelming by their sheer mass.  God bless the dash cam, without which we would never have documentary evidence of what really happens on the streets of America, or how unbelievably dumb so many cops are that they would behave the way they do on video.

Having hopefully made a sufficient mea culpa, and given you enough reason to go immediately to Injustice Everywhere and watch each of the five (yes, count ’em, 5) videos that appeared this week alone, let’s cut to my favorite and ask ourselves why.



The trick in this Beaumont, Texas, video isn’t to watch the fellow in the forefront, who one would otherwise assume to be the star, but rather the guy in the background on the right.  He’s standing there, doing as he was apparently told, hands on the roof of the car.  Eventually, he’s taken to the rear of the car and appears to go cooperatively, no issues raised.  So far, no biggie.

Then comes some galoof with a baton.  He’s kinda doofy looking, probably unhappy with his sex life and feeling rather unfulfilled in this arrest as no blood has been spilled.  What’s a cop to do?

In this video, the man in the background on the right is taken around the back of the pulled-over car to be cuffed when another officer pulls his baton, walks towards him, and then unleashes a barrage of 13 baton strikes to the apparently compliant suspect. If that wasn’t enough another officer then tasers him after he’s taken to the ground.

Bet you never saw the Taser coming!  The sheer gratuitousness of the violence, it’s utter pointlessness, is what makes this my fav of the week.  No excuses. No explanations.  The cop just wanted to give somebody a good tune-up, and so he did.
 
Two additional details worth noting.  First, none of the other cops were apparently bothered in the slightest by their compadre’s whupping of this otherwise docile fellow.  Second, even a neaderthal like doofy-cop should have been aware of the fact that he was on candid dash-cam, yet the synaptic connections were obviously not firing, leaving one to wonder just low the intellectual bar is set in Beaumont.  Remember, people’s lives are at stake based on the processing speed of police officers.  If they can’t figure out what to do when it’s in their own self-interest, what are the chances they can figure it out when it’s only about you?

And if there was no video of this utterly pointless, totally senseless, absolutely gratuitous beating, would anyone believe it happened?  I can hear the prosecutor now, “Why would Officer Jones want to beat Derrick Newman?  He’s got nothing against him.”  I’ve heard that argument a thousand times before there was ubiquitous video.  That’s a thousand beating that went unbelieved, right Judge?