What happened in the video was shocking. In itself, reason to believe that for all the protests, all the criticism, all the challenges of the public to the manner in which police dealt with people, cop culture really hadn’t changed.

Esqueda told USA TODAY that he’s become a pariah among his coworkers since July 2020, when he shared with a television reporter footage from January of that year showing how officers treated a handcuffed Black man in medical distress. Officers slapped Eric Lurry, restricted his airway and shoved a baton in his mouth hours before his death.

This starts with what was done to Lurry.

In video footage from a squad car camera obtained by WBBM-TV, a Joliet police sergeant, identified by the station as Doug May, is seen slapping Lurry’s face while he was handcuffed in the back seat of the car. “Wake up, bitch,” May says.

May then appears to pinch Lurry’s nose closed for a minute and 38 seconds, WBBM-TV reports. Joliet police Sergeant Javier Esqueda, a training officer, told the station Lurry may have been chewing on a bag of drugs earlier in the video footage and officers wanted him to open his mouth.

Later, another officer is seen on the squad car video inserting a baton into Lurry’s open mouth. Lurry is eventually taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead hours after his arrival.

The officers involved in this outrageous treatment of Lurry were disciplined. They caught six days suspension. But that’s only where this starts. Esqueda wasn’t some overly-sensitive rookie, but a 27-year veteran of the Joliet Police Department, a sergeant, a training officer, and a whistleblower who gave the squad car video to a reporter.

Members of the Joliet Police Officer’s Association on Wednesday voted 35-1 to expel Esqueda, a move first reported by The Herald-Ledger newspaper in Joliet. In a letter informing him of the impending vote last month, union leaders described his conduct as “reprehensible.” The letter did not offer specifics on what actions from Esqueda prompted the vote.

Esqueda’s ouster from the union for his “reprehensible” conduct came on top of his prosecution.

Among his criminal charges, Esqueda is facing claims that he illegally used his department-issued laptop to access video of the Lurry incident. Esqueda said he watched the video after he logged in and saw that it was available for him to view, which typically indicates that an investigation had been closed. He added that he’d heard about the video and was concerned because one of his trainees was involved in the arrest.

Esqueda was also subject to internal discipline by then-Chief Dawn Malec, who has since been fired, then reinstated but demoted, as a result of the scandal.

Malec scheduled discipline hearings for Esqueda at least twice in the early fall to announce what his punishment would be for leaking the video, which department leaders had already shown to a group of local pastors, Lurry’s family and a few local reporters in the days before Esqueda stepped forward.

Apparently, showing the video to local pastors and reporters produced little interest. It wasn’t until Esqueda revealed the video that things got hot, culminating in Esqueda’s being thrown out of the brotherhood.

“The Executive Board finds cause that you engaged in conduct that is detrimental to the orderly operation of the Association, and your conduct is deemed so reprehensible that removal from membership is appropriate,” [Joliet Sgt. and supervisors union president, Patrick] Cardwell wrote in the letter, dated Oct. 19.

Despite the hubris of outsiders believing that they have the “moral suasion” or power to change the culture of policing, to make cops sufficiently afraid that they will behave more humanely toward others, it’s never been the case. Protest marches were for the sake of the marchers and their friends, the police being on the other side of the protest. The notion that these protests would somehow inform police of how people felt about them, about what they did, was childish and self-indulgent. Cops didn’t care that a bunch of clueless entitled kids were angry. The kids didn’t “get it” any more than the rest of us who fought against this misconduct for decades.

But Sgt. Esqueda was on the inside, part of Team Blue. He got it. He understood the job. He knew what it was like to rely on his brethren to back him up, to be there for him just as he was there for them. And still, they threw him out because he did the unthinkable, the unacceptable. He burned his brothers by revealing the squad car video to the media.

One of the hardest questions amongst serious people concerned about police misconduct and reform is whether anything has been accomplished by the public shift against police. Have the protests following George Floyd’s death done anything other than burn down businesses and cost a few extra lives? Have police, who really hate the fact that people don’t appreciate them and view them as heroes rather than callous killers, gotten the message the people are outraged by their misconduct, by their violence for their own benefit at the expense of the public they putatively serve?

What’s happened, and is happening, to Sgt. Javier Esqueda may not be representative of all cops or all departments, but it is a view inside the belly of the beast. The change needed, that cops stop seeing themselves as a different breed apart from the people they exist to serve, can only come from within cop culture. And at least for Esqueda, it appears that cop culture remains just as isolated from the rest of society as before. Esqueda was thrown out of the union because he didn’t put his blue tribe first. For all that’s happened over the past few years, the blue wall stands as firm as ever. Remember, Frank Serpico?