F*CK THE PO-LEECE!!

So this morning I was minding my own business, eating my Lucky Charms in front of the TV, when all of a sudden I see a cop beating the living crap out of a little girl. Then he takes out his gun, and at point blank range, shoots her in the face. Crazy right? Okay, the last part there with the shooting is a complete fabrication. Didn't happen. The first part, minus a slight embellishment, did though. This police officer, from where I didn't actually catch, was attempting to arrest and/or subdue a girl who I believe was 15 years old. I know, I didn't catch a lot of the details, but it was early and my brain requires a couple of hours to reboot every morning.

Anyway, this man is holding this girl with her hands behind her back, bent over the front of his cruiser and she's clearly not a big fan of the idea. She's struggling and wiggling and writhing to escape his grasp, or, at the very least, to avoid being handcuffed. At one point it seems that she decided it would be a good idea to bite the nice man's hand as they wrestled. He thought it wasn't. In a quick sequence he goes from pulling on her arms to straight up kidney punching her. Yeah. Approximately 1.5 seconds later, while she's still gasping from the punch, he rips out his pepper spray and blasts her in the face from about 2 inches away. Yeah again. I know what you're thinking: That must have been a huge 15 year old girl. I'm afraid not. I would estimate the weight of the girl in the video to be under 100 lbs by a small margin. Granted, I'm awful at guessing weight, but she was tiny. Oh yeah, and just to make things extra special, the little girl the big, bad white man was beating up, she was black. Yeah again...again.

Admittedly, I have very little experience trying to arrest little girls. So perhaps this is the way these things usually go. However, I have to believe that if I needed to arrest a little girl, I could overpower her simply enough. That's me, and I'm a 22 year old guy with no training whatsoever in this area. This was a veteran police officer. I'd like to think that even if it were a difficult task I'd manage without kidney punching her or using pepper spray so close to her face that it could cause permanent damage to her eyes (not my words, the "expert" on the news claimed this). Then they showed another recent video of officers tazering the living shit out of a woman who was disorderly (probably with a good helping of drunk as an appetizer). But they didn't just tazer her, they did it repeatedly. She fell into a car head first at one point and seemed stunned but when she got up they did it again. Hell, once they got her in the cruiser she was kicking around so they kept zapping her. WHEN SHE WAS IN THE CAR. A few weeks ago was the guy who got tazered half to death because he was aggressively asking John Kerry a question that nobody really cared about anyway. And just yesterday, in a truly tragic incident, a police officer interrupted a homecoming party and killed 6 kids. I don't believe they have a motive for that one yet, aside from the knowledge that one of them was his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly, I'm apprehensive about approaching a cop in a dimly lit part of town at night.

It seems to me that one of these tapes come out every month or so, with some police officer somewhere using excessive force on some poor man/woman/child. Few things piss me off more than police brutality. These are the people who are in a position of power and trust, supposedly to Protect and Serve us. How dare they. I'm not a member of the ACLU, and I'm generally not as sympathetic to the plight of others as this post may lead you to believe. However, it's pretty messed up when those who are supposed to be maintaining order so that we can live our lives without fear betray us and give us a new reason to be afraid. I'm not sure if police brutality is actually escalating or if it's simply technology which now allows us to catch more of the abusers, but I don't think it matters either way. Don't get me wrong, I favor limited rights for serious criminals (it is my belief that those who would deprive another citizen of their rights by, say, killing them, forfeit their own rights in the process), but the cases I'm talking about are when the officers are unprovoked or dealing with non-dangerous law breakers. I don't think we can live freely in a society where the enforcers of the law are allowed to willingly break them to achieve their own ends. We're better than that, we can't allow them to hide behind a blue wall. Yes, I realize it's dangerous and scary to be a police officer in the modern world, but I'm afraid that's the profession they chose. I mean, if a guy spit in my face and I had a night-stick handy, I'd probably feel free to loosen up a couple of his teeth with it. But I've never sworn any oaths about protecting our citizens or put myself in a position where I have a great deal of power and trust to uphold for them. Because of the nature of their duty, police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, not a lower one. And those who betray are trust should pay a dear price. Might I suggest giving that little girl a night-stick and some pepper spray while the assaulting officer is tied to a chair? Just a thought.