Police Gone Amok With Excessive Force
Just in the past year, there have been so many killings by police of what seem to be unwarranted circumstances. Has this always actually been the norm and because of social media, cell phone cameras or videos, Twitter and FaceBook, the police are just now getting caught in the act? Or, are these cases simply just anomalies outside of the norm for police using excessive force?
It is hard to tell. It is like the pedophile thing. It use to be one never ever heard of such cases very often and now it is fairly common place to here of a 19-year old sodomizing a 3 or 4 year old, or a teacher, age 35, raping a teen boy age 16, or other sex offenders doing horrible things. Again, as this always been happening and it is just now coming to light because of the instant technology that makes this capable?
In this week alone, we have had two serious and deadly videos showing police using WAY excessive force. In one case, the man is stopped for a routine traffic violation- a fix it ticket for a taillight. The officer does his routine and obtains the man's driver license and walks back to his car to run a check. Meanwhile, the man is freaking out because he knows he has a warrant out for him because he owes back child support. He panics and jets out of the car to avoid the inevitable outcome. The police officer pursues and then, instead of simply racing on foot to get the guy, he pulls out his gun and kills the man-all for owing child support that he probably could not pay because he had no job. Certainly not worth losing a life over. Child support needs to be more humane towards the person owing it. A person who fails to pay it can lose their license to drive, have their wages garnished. If he loses his license, how are they to get work to make money to pay the child support? If the support is too high, the Court could care less if the person paying it has nothing to live on. The Court's attitude is, "It's not my problem". Well, yeah it is, when a police officer murders over it! Now, a man is dead and the officer is in jail. No good outcome will come from this.
Then, there is the man who, after a three hour police chase in California, which ended up on horseback, being captured and brutally beaten by police that was far worse than Rodney King. It was caught on camera by a TV news helicopter over head. But what is worse is the fact that the man had laid down and basically surrendered. There does not appear to be any weapons in either episodes. It all started when the man was trying be served a search warrant for identity theft. The white man was beaten for two minutes and punched 37 times, 13 of the blows were to his head as he lay on the ground, struck with a baton four times. Pusok is a father with three kids. A total of 11 officers are involved.
Crime is crime but when suspect does surrender, police should not take out their anger about the pursuit and use excessive force against the victim. This is why there is a need for all police officers to have cameras on them to monitor their behavior. Had the police known that the helicopter overhead was a news channel reporter, I am sure they would have acted differently. But, they assumed it was a police helicopter joining in the pursuit and had it been, none of this brutality would have been known. The police department would have just put out a statement justifying it or said nothing about it.
