It is a battery. The slightest offensive touching is a battery. I can stand close to you and argue all I want, but I have no right to make contact with you. If I do, you have the right to use reasonable force to make me stop. Of course, you couldn’t shoot me or beat me with a baton, but a mild shove? Seems reasonable.
If there was any contact at all (of which I am skeptical) it was incidental, not offensive.
In fact, I just said that. Please pay attention this time.
The thing that perplexes me is that one guy is holding up an entire squad. He was talking to, at most, 3 officers. The rest of them had plenty of room to move ahead to where they needed to be, and they should not have been so ignorant that they would not know what to do without their fearless leader.
The other thing is that urban areas are notorious for having lots of railings, and police are known to carry wire-ties/handcuffs, so they easily could have gotten the nuisance person out of their way, safely secured to some fixture where he would not be a potential impediment to their work – no actual arrest needed, they could have just sidelined him; instead, they had to expend extra effort to get him medical aid and to later cope with the conflagration of PR ugliness.
Which tells me that our police forces are not just thugs, they are stupid thugs, and these are the people we leave in charge of keeping the peace.
I don’t need the snark. You can see on the video the second the man makes contact with the officer because that is when he reacts. You don’t get to play the “I’m not touching you” game with police when you are illegally present and purposely obstructing.
Again, any group could thwart police missions to enforce curfews if one person is allowed to delay three officers. Just send the guys up who have criminal records to get arrested while your group continues to violate the curfew.
And, if you are elderly and have poor balance, maybe you don’t confront a line of police officers.
I would agree with you if they killed him like George Floyd or beat him with batons. They gave a mild shove, which most people would prefer instead of a night in jail. It’s outrage for outrage’s sake. If you’ve seen my posts in other threads, I abhor police escalation of violence. This guy was simply asking for it and he got something mild in return. Just because he decided to flop or had poor balance because he is elderly just means that he shouldn’t play a losing game.
I’ll stop if you stop saying things that call for a snark response. Deal? (Portraying incidental contact as “offensive” merits a snark response).
No. I don’t see that at all. You do realize we’re seeing a three dimensional reality that has been projected onto a 2D screen, right? It’s hard to impossible to gauge how far the phone is from the officer’s arm (or, indeed, whether there was any contact).
And I see no reason to assume the cop’s action was a response to being touched. Why would I make that assumption? I have seen multiple videos of cops assaulting people with no provocation whatsoever over the past two weeks; I see no indication that this incident is any different.
Finally, I don’t see any “I’m not touching you” game being played. At all. I see a man gesturing while holding on to a cell phone. I can’t be sure if there was or was not any contact between this man (or his phone) and the officer, but if any contact was present it appears completely incidental to the gesturing. It neither appears that his intent was to touch nor that his intent was to imply touching.
When these things go south, it’s always the victims responsibility to act just so to avoid the negative outcome and never the responsibility of the trained professionals.
The mental gymnastics required are mind boggling.
This is exactly wrong. This misses the point. Do you think Rosa Parks would have rather have been shoved off the bus, left with scraped knees on the side of the road? Of course not. Because the point of civil disobedience is to use due process.
Denying someone due process and then claiming you did them a favor is the epitome of a corrupt state.
But he was asking for it…
At least two posters on this thread are sounding like CTers, saying he took a dive.
By your “legal theory’ if your grandma slaps me on the wrist, and I was so inclined, I am legally allowed to knock her out in an effort to “repel a battery.” Or is it only cops that are allowed to knock people out when responding to a battery?
I haven’t been on this board for a while, but are people actually trying to justify pushing an old man down and causing his head to bleed? Jeebus wept.
I know, right? And don’t forget about the one who thinks it was an act.
Is it that fucking hard to say “Yeah, the police went overboard on that guy”?
Perhaps I’m living in a different world, but to look at that video and say anything other than “I don’t think cops should be that aggressive (at a minimum)” is just a different way of thinking that I will never understand.
The Grand Jury has not voted to allow a criminal proceeding to continue against the two policemen. This is unsatisfying. Instead of the local prosecutor taking the flak for deciding there was little chance for a conviction, he is hiding behind a grand jury…
In any case, the gentleman who was injured is out of the hospital.
Zombie thread.
It seems the legal proceedings have concluded with no action taken against the policemen. The news story does not update us on the man who was injured.