You must have had your eyes closed. Or maybe you didn’t watch the videos linked in the OP at all.
Try opening your eyes and watching them in slow motion this time: https://www.youtube.com/user/USLAWdotcom
Wow, dude.
Yeah, I saw that. Both times. There’s no question he pepper sprayed them, or whatever. I still don’t see the problem. They were trying to interfere with the police putting the barrier up. You don’t see that one person in the back, trying to tear the barrier down just as the policeman with the pepper spray approaches?
Could get nasty: Anonymous have found his name, employment records, home address and name of his wife and kids and posted it online.
Ah, well, as long as you’re doing better than Tehran, where they hang homosexuals using cranes, or Cairo, where they drive trucks into protesters, everything’s all right.
I don’t.
When did the police become such pussies? Serious question. You’re contending the only method they had of controlling a crowd that was shaking some flimsy plastic barrier was to pepper spray everybody in the eyes?
The video clearly shows a police man who had literally nothing to do with policing the front line of the barrier walk up, spray pepper spray indiscriminately into a crowd, and then walk away trying to pretend nothing happened. For a start, if there’s one person trying to remove a barrier, why not actually deal with that one person instead of carpet bombing the entire street with pepper spray? Further, if he believed he was doing nothing wrong, why did he walk away like a 5 year old trying to blend back in with everybody else immediately after?
Basicly the police force has several methods to control a crowd. Using weapons (I see pepper spray as one) should only be used if there is danger for personal safety og major property damage. What this policeofficer does is not short of beating these women or let a police dog chew on them (a common used police technique in Denmark).
He do not look like he has anything to do with the situation, but walks right up to the fence and sprays them. He must have made that decision before he went up there. And the hand from the woman could easily be trying to protect herself.
Of course it must be possible to film a police action, but it should be as obvios that one should be careful using the recordings as true evidence of abuse. Like the previous entries and my entry shows can it be interpreted in many ways.
The important issue here is surely one of proportionality.
Is it a proportional response for police to spray a woman for yelling at them from behind a barricade? Clearly not, even if they were able to reasonably claim that she was committing a crime.
Punishment is a judicial responsibility, not a police one. Any officer who can’t cope with a bit of verbal abuse without resorting to violence has so little self-control that he has no business being in the job.
MDE
Do you even try and have your arguments make sense? In what way were the 2 women who got sprayed involved with helping the person you claim you saw “trying to tear the barrier down” such that they deserved to be sprayed?
FFS, if you’re going to make an argument for the use of police force, at least try and be cogent.
Or are you seriously arguing that because one person, somewhere, is doing something wrong, all people deserve to be met with force?
WTF was that anyway? I know it does look fabulous but does not so much look like police equipment.
It’s just construction barrier. A tough, plastic soft fence that you can roll out easily. It is actually harder to tear than you might think, but it wouldn’t stop anyone. They were probably using it as a barrier to keep the protestors where they wanted them without having to resort to more permanent and expensive solutions. You see the stuff used anywhere there are temporary crowds.
I missed that guy. Apparently, so did the pepper sprayer, since he didn’t spray him, he sprayed women who didn’t appear to touch the barrier at all.
Ultimately, though, someone needs to be the police. They need to work to ensure that protests like these don’t turn into full blown riots. In order to keep the peace, they have to be provided broad powers of arrest/use of force. They are also human, and make bad calls, bad choices, especially when they are in stressful situations. Until you can breed a police officer that doesn’t make mistakes, some of them are going to abuse the powers they are given.
That doesn’t mean abuses shouldn’t be punished, or that we shouldn’t work to minimize them, it means we shouldn’t be shocked that these things happen.
Do not accuse other posters of trolling outside The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
My guess is that the officer will go unpunished, btw.
I mean, Officer Pogan wasn’t convicted of assaulting a bicyclist, even tho the whole thing was on tape. cite
I see no reason to think that this officer will fare any worse.
A new video surfaced, prompting an internal investigation into misconduct. This video shows the clear recklessness and unconcerned abandon with which this senior officer used his pepper spray.
The police are not supposed to work only for the rich and powerful. they are supposed to protect us all. People with legitimate gripes should have the right to demonstrate. Those without ,have the same rights. The streets are not the property of the wealthy.
There is no reason for the police to abuse the citizens who are marching. They should not corral them. They should not mace them. They should sit across the street and observe. if an illegal act is committed, then they should go to work. The police actions cause most of the problems.
Yeah, I’d like to see the police apologists respond to those. This is pretty fucked up.
He looks like my grandmother spraying air-freshener after Uncle Frank smoked one of his cigars. Except evil.
As a general answer to the OP, in America at least police brutality:
- More widely accepted as something that happens and should be punished.
- In my observance, less common and less severe.
- Less likely to cause death versus the past.
- Still occurs, still kills people, and is still a problem.
Point four obviates the needs to start linking to news articles from the present day, I’m not saying it’s gone, I’m saying it is less common and more punished than it once was. When I was growing up I honestly couldn’t imagine a police officer being punished for beating the shit out of someone, anyone, if they felt the desire to do so. Unless that someone was like a judge or something.
I don’t know enough about the issue, but I think maybe they pepper sprayed the women because they were attempting to erect a barrier in a certain line, and the women were refusing to move out of that line’s path.
The heavy use of both pepper spray and tasers these days is actually a result of, in part, the desire to curb police beatings.
Starting during the 70s and just growing since then there has been greater public awareness of police misconduct, police beatings, improper use of force and etc. Every incident lead to lots of bad press for the police. Where tasers and pepper spray have come in, is they essentially allow police to subdue (most) persons without having to manhandle them. I don’t doubt that matters of “tactical toolbox” and “police welfare” are part of the reason also–a significant part of the reason for the adoption of these tools. However I think we shouldn’t underestimate a decent portion of it has been that at one point when these tools first began entering common use, they were not seen as “bad” as using direct physical force, and thus were seen as more “tame.” And less likely to get the police in trouble.
Pepper spray I think most people still find relatively innocuous, or at least they should. I’ve been pepper sprayed, it’s painful but it’s not anywhere close to as bad as being beaten up. I’ve been in fights where I hurt all over for 5 days, pepper spray doesn’t do that. Also, beatings kill people all the time, pepper spray is very safe versus being beat up. I know people who have died in fights from straight up blunt force trauma from another person’s feet or fists, a friend’s son is in a permanent vegetative state because he suffered traumatic brain damage in a bar fight his freshman year of college.
Now obviously when police use physical contact to control a situation, they aren’t supposed to deliver a beating, obviously. But sometimes scuffles do ensue and sometimes officers are allowed to punch and kick if the scuffle reaches a certain point, and that can cause longer and more serious damage than your typical pepper spray or taser incident. (I won’t get into the taser debate too much because some people claim they have killed tons of people with flawed methodology, the truth is they have probably killed a few people but the vast majority of the time the person getting tasered comes off with no serious permanent injury versus being physically wrestled to the ground which can often cause permanent serious injury.)
Further, before pepper spray and tasers one of the ways police would handle “moving people who didn’t want to be moved” or subduing disorderly people was by using batons as “pain compliance” tools. The proper use of a baton is to strike at certain areas where it is relatively safe but where it hurts unbelievably. Would you rather be struck with something like that over and over or pepper sprayed? I’ve been pepper sprayed and I’d almost certainly rather be pepper sprayed again versus having a cock hit me with a baton. Part of the problem with batons being used that way is in the heat of the moment it’s very easy to stop heating the “appropriate” spots for “pain compliance” and to instead bust someone’s skull. Getting hit in the head with a baton is potentially life threatening, way more so than any pepper spray. Additionally, people squirm and move as you’re hitting them, making it not entirely effortless to hit them in the “safe” spots.
I’m not defending this pepper spray incident because I don’t know enough about it. But what I am saying is that pepper spray and tasers really came about precisely because people were uncomfortable with more traditional tools: physical force.