In the video where the bike officer is down, I see police cars, but no ambulance.
He was actually walking away from the cops. That’s what he was asked to do. And being on your phone, with your head up like he had, doesn’t prevent you from also paying attention to your surroundings. Those surroundings were not a “a potential riot” as the second video makes very clear.
I’d like to know hw they can justify that one too. Pretty hard to claim he wasn’t trying to get away from them and they just kept spraying him and then assaulted him by throwing him down. Maybe he wasn’t moving fast enough for them, what with his limp.
Smapti, you promised to stay away from these threads, because you realized you could not view these situations objectively due to past experience. Please honor your promise.
It comes in convenient spray form!
Around the 30 second mark, upper-left near the pole.
I hear the cops in Boston are still on edge due to the frequent disruptions from rabble-rousers there.
FYI, here is a blog post by Jesse Hagopian, the history teacher who was pepper-sprayed. It’s on the website of The Nation magazine.
First instinct having watched the video and having no experience whatsoever of US Police is that the Police Office has definitely behaved badly but I’d really like to be able to see what happened in the couple of minutes immediately prior to that.
I’m also suspicious about how and why someone would be recording someone else walking along talking on their phone, who seems to veer directly toward the police officer initially and then away before he cops a spray (literally.
Something smells like a set up to me, but the cops behaviour in spraying the stuff around so freely is still wrong.
I agree that there could be more to this. Assuming that was the case she was shooting at everybody moving and she was aiming at their heads.
I, too think that she was nutso, but where will you aim pepper spray except at the face?
Think in terms of other crowd control devices. Would you aim a bean bag shotgun round at someone’s face? No.
She could have sprayed lower to make a point. The stuff’s pretty nasty. It’s like getting sprayed by a skunk only a bazillion times more painful.
The second video posted shows the minute or so before the spraying. A cop had been knocked off his bike, hence the cops setting up their bikes as a barricade. It doesn’t justify her spraying a man doing as he was ordered to.
She’d already pressed the spray a couple of times before the short video starts, so I guess that’s why someone was videoing her. Also people get their camera phones out a lot at protests.
In my opinion, that officer was clearly out of control. The other officers at the scene should have restrained her, and immediately taken her into custody for her own and the public’s safety.
She was not acting normally for this situation. At all. At a minimum, she should have removed herself from the police line.
A new video posted yesterday shows (some of) the incident in which the original police officer was injured. It happens in the first 10 seconds of the video - the cop is chasing someone, the guy runs into a car, the cop and guy kind of grapple and the cop falls down. Evidently he twisted his ankle when he fell.
I think people will see what they want to see in the video. However, people who see it as the guy causing the injury won’t find support from Seattle Police Officers Guild president Ron Smith, who said that it does not appear that Officer Hylton “was run over by any means. It appears as though he’s trying to do something and he lost control.”
Looking at your first video link, frame by frame, it’s still hard to see what happened. I does look like the crowd is getting out of control though. That might of been a time to use some pepper spray.
But, it happens so fast.
I still think the cop in the very first video randomly spraying the ‘crowd’ is way over the top.
[side note]What the fuck is wrong with people, that they can’t have a peaceful assembly?[/sn]
I would say the lady cop definitely appeared to be unhinged.
Close call, but I wouldn’t fire her.
Suspend for a week or ten days and then require two weeks of retraining. Even better if she had to pass some sort of threat recognition test.
This woman is crazy. She needs meds, not a job involving weapons, including such things as pepper spray. Seriously.
Close call, my ass. ROFL. If the situation was so bad that it required pepper spray, why was she the only cop even facing in that direction, let alone holding pepper spray?
the other videos are hard to follow because of the distance involved and trees in the way.
So I’m somewhat reluctant to say they couldn’t use pepper spray in such a situation.
However, looking at the original close-up of the pepper spraying incident I can’t help but see a series of officers calmly standing by their bikes and one officer frantically drawing a very wide arch around herself with pepper spray.
So I’m a little confused by what you said. “Unhinged” is something I would equate to someone incapable of doing the job regardless of the amount of training involved. I’m not sure how you test that except by weeding people out who do so poorly in such a situation.
That seems accurate to me.