Little Brother is watching
Scott posted this extraordinary video of a Seattle police officer punching a seventeen year old girl in the face and it really is quite shocking to see. What struck me about the incident, though, was not the police brutality. That’s been going on forever, regardless of how surprising it is to witness.
No, the really striking thing is that we’re witnessing it to begin with.
At first you have the video from a distance, and then whoever is filming gets closer and closer. You see more people watching, looks of disbelief on their faces as the cop wrestles with the girl. This is surprisingly close footage, but what’s really surprising is not that there’s someone filming the incident, but rather that everyone is. Half a dozen cell phones are pointed right at the cop.
The Rodney King fiasco was filmed in secret, from a distance. Historically, the rare police-abuse tapes we’ve seen have been shot from across the street or from a security camera.
But now all that’s changed. Everyone has a cell phone these days, and almost every phone is equipped with a camera with at least some video functionality. Even if the cops had tried to confiscate phones, with as many people milling about the scene they probably never could have confiscated all of them, and certainly not before files were emailed or published to the web directly from the phones.
This is the power of communication technology unleashed, the power of information and the distribution of information in the hands of the ‘small people’. This is populism I can believe in. Techno-populism, hacktivism. The simplicity of a cell phone and a crowd.
Now we just need our courts and government institutions to catch up with the rest of us. Police abuses won’t be so easily covered up in this day and age, no matter how hard local governments try to keep them under wraps. For every camera the government sets up to spy on us to keep us safe from terrorists, we’ll have twenty more in our pockets, connected to our own networks.
Little Brother is watching.
Hear, Hear.
Right now the thing we need to do is repeal or prevent the various laws making it illegal to record the police.Report
I still think that seeing the cop break free of the girl, stop, look at her, take stock of the situation, and then make the decision to haul off and clock a young girl in the face makes for even more startling viewing than even, perhaps, your average round of police brutality. Though, to be fair, there is footage of far worse incidents and watching this kind of activity is and should always be deeply offensive.Report
Is it fair to wonder if a white chick would have been punched in an otherwise identical situation?Report
@Jaybird, I wondered the same thing and my conclusion was: I doubt it.Report
@Jaybird, Would the reaction be the same if it was a guy, white or black?Report
@Cascadian, that’s a good point too.
It’s hard for me to watch that video without thinking “chickpuncher”.
Maybe I’m idealizing the past but I seem to remember cops being able to control a sitch better when I was a kid.Report
@Jaybird, Cops were awful where and when I was a kid. However, let’s add this recent event into the context:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hrG3lz2PQs
Also in Seattle. Now the situations are wildly different bu,t I think, they show that there is a balance that has yet to be found.Report
@Cascadian, What’s with comment moderation?Report
@Cascadian, not sure why your comment was being held. Apologies.Report
I asked a friend of mine, who was a cop and is now a tax attorney, about this incident and he thought the cops action was justified. The woman interferes with his arrest, assists her friend in resisting arrest and assaults him him during the process. From what I read about the incident the cops had been told to do something about jaywalkers in that area. Hopefully that woman learned her lesson.Report
@Scott, so punching a 17 year old girl in the face is the best way to deal with that situation.Report
@Scott H. Payne, It might not be the best. But take a look at them, do you think reasoning would have worked better?Report
@Carsten, if it wasn’t the best then why is it okay? Why aren’t we talking about why that was the wrong response and the officer should have followed a procedure that did not involve punching a minor?Report
@Scott H. Payne, wait so we demand the very best of everyone in this society at all times? … we might as well close down the country then. sometime good is good enough. and i honestly think the reaction was not great, but it was good enough. after all the woman he beat in the face while initially interfering with what the cop wanted to do, afterwards stopped doing so.
if you demand the best then why don’t you ask for the best behavior of those kids?Report
@Carsten, we demand the best in judgment calls of those individuals we train to police society and authorize to use extreme force in very specific situations and when they fail to live up to those expectations we, rightly, question their failure in judgment.Report
@Carsten, I don’t demand the best of everyone in this society at all times. Not even freakin’ close.
For example, I’m willing to give people leeway if they happen to Jaywalk.
It’s the people we give nightsticks, tazers, and guns to and to whom we say “you are allowed to punch chicks in the face” that I hold to a higher standard.
Should we not hold those whom we give the authority to punch chicks to a higher standard than, say, teenagers?Report
@Scott H. Payne,
I guess you think the cop should continue to let the girl assault him and to keep interfering in the arrest? I’m assuming that the cop told her to stop and after that it was either punch, mace, baton or gun, so yes.Report
@Scott, no, I think he should have followed a course of action that did not involve blatantly assaulting a minor in public. I think that is what police officers are trained to do. And so I question why this officer failed to do so in this instance.Report
@Scott H. Payne, Scott – as a matter of civic responsibility – what are the obligations of citizens in their behavior towards the police? Surely you would argue that you cannot yell ‘fire’ in a movie theater and even if not specifically told so, people should just sort of know this is bad behavior. Isn’t assaulting a police officer along those same lines?Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, I don’t condone the actions of the girls, but I think the officer’s response was inappropriate in the extreme. The poor behaviour of the citizens does not somehow justify what strikes me as extremely poor judgment call of trained police officer.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, I think that when you make a decision to assault someone, the possibility of a punch in the face is an assumed risk. Is this a case of his actions being worse than theirs? Does his training make him more obligated to behave than a citizen?Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, “Does his training make him more obligated to behave than a citizen?”
I certainly think so.
Do you feel that we should be pleased that he didn’t shoot the chick?Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, So an average citizen shouldn’t be expected to have the intelligence to know you don’t assault a police officer (or anyone for that matter)? You’re putting a greater responsibility on the police than the citizenry.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, “You’re putting a greater responsibility on the police than the citizenry.”
No shit, Sherlock.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, But why? Ignorance of the law is not a defense.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, we give them nightsticks, tazers, and guns. We give them the authority to, among other things, punch chicks in the face.
Should we *NOT* hold them to a higher standard?Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, The police are the physical extension of laws created by the citizenry. The citizenry should be expected to have full knowledge of the laws they are asking the police to enforce. So no, the standard should not be higher. Both sides should follow the same rules.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, if this is expressing support for universal open carry, I agree 100%.
I imagine that the cop wouldn’t have punched the chick in the face if he knew everybody standing around were armed.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, If there was a guarantee of everyone being armed the officer would have rolled in with a platoon.Report
@Scott H. Payne,
Why don’t you find someone who has real world experience as a cop and ask him or like like I did? That might be more helpful than assuming what cops are supposed to do.Report
As the resident police apologist here, I’d like to point out that both girls were assaulting a police officer prior to the punch, so my sympathy for them is pretty much zero. I agree that the punch looks to be a bit ‘pre-meditated’. What’s interesting is that I think at this point if he had pulled out a taser or some mace and fired away, I don’t know that this would be getting similar attention. For some reason we see a punch to the face as much more violent and extreme. An interesting feature of American culture.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, “As the resident police apologist here . . .” That’s a classic disclaimer, Mike.Report
@Will, I’m just anticipating the remarks by our libertarian friends here at The League.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, Haha, yeah. Shades of those epic threads about the Skip Gates arrest.Report
@Will, BingoReport
The question no one seems to be asking is what did the to be arrested woman do and why is she resisting arrest. If people would all behave in a civil way the officer could have made his arrest and been out of there.. Living in a part of DC where those situations are not uncommon I have to say that I can understand the cop and am extremely annoyed by those screaming and yelling bystanders.Report
Long story short; more information is better. Now if we could just get some photos and videos of the things that were done to “terrorists” in our name then we’d really be cooking.Report
I am not a police apologist. At all. But I also wonder about this case. Keep in mind that it’s not just a cop and two girls. (Are they minors? Would he have known that? does it matter?) There are lots of people milling about. The cop has no idea who they are, who is with whom, etc. It’s his job to get the girl he is arresting under control, get her in the damn car, and get out of dodge. She will not comply. Making matters worse, the other girl intervenes. And she intervenes PHYSICALLY. Touching a cop who is arresting someone seems akin to touching a dog that’s eating. It’s a bad idea.
Should the cop react better than a dog? Sure. But come on. There are dozens of people in front of him and behind him and the person he is arrestig is resisting and the girl she is with GRABS HIM.
I hate to say this: But I think I would have punched her, too.
Plenty of shocking video of police misconduct out there. Radley Balko does God’s work. But in this case… I just don’t think it measures up.
You try going into a bad, potentially violent scene with dozens of people you don’t know. You try going in alone.
She needed to stay out of his way.Report
First impression: the cop is totally justified. Each of those girls can be charged with at least two if not three crimes: assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, and whatever it was he stopped them for in the first place. There were a bunch of people standing around, and if they hadn’t been so busy filming the incident for freaking YouTube, that situation could have gotten really nasty really quickly. The cop needed to end that situation as fast as possible and get the hell out of there. They got what was coming to them.
Second: I really have to laugh at the “our own networks” idea in the OP. Seriously? “Our own networks?” Don’t you mean Verizon’s network? Or AT&T? Or whoever? The internet only seems distributed and wild. In reality, the infrastructure is concentrated on a tiny number of players–there are perhaps a dozen or two companies that actually matter–over which the public has almost no control but the government has plenty. Just today, the FCC voted to initiate proceedings to regulate broadband like they regulate the phone system.Report
Even if you think the officer deserves a medal and a week’s paid vacation, aren’t you glad the incident was recorded? On-the-spot video is the only thing that’s really moved the debate about police brutality forward at least since I’ve been alive.
That said, I’ve certainly seen worse. Like a police officer shooting a prone, handcuffed man in the back. Or tasering a 70-year-old grandma. Or all the puppycides at Radley Balko’s site.
The above strikes me as not much to champion for any side at all. But at least we can talk about it a bit more objectively.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, is it really objectively? you see part of a scene you don’t see the whole story. i have to say that i wish those people would not only film the police, but also criminals. but oddly enough these guys rarely do that.Report
@Carsten, we would have seen some chicks… JAYWALKING!!!!!!Report
@Carsten,
Of course you only film the police reacting, as how else are you going to get evidence for your police brutality lawsuit?Report
@Scott,
Of course you film the police reacting, because if they’re doing their jobs properly, they have nothing to fear. Isn’t that how the reasoning runs when they employ it against us? Any video is better than purely my word versus yours.Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
No the cops still have the fear of being hauled into court by some plaintiff’s lawyer who plays the video for folks like Scott P. and E.D. who are ready to assume the cop was wrong.Report
@Scott, if you can’t find 1 person willing to hang a jury on whether the chickpuncher was just doing his job, the cops have failed society.Report
@Scott,
ACORN ‘Sting’ videos.Report
@Jaybird,
If two people like E.D. and Scott P. who are supposedly of above average intelligence are ready to assume the cop was being brutal, I can only guess at what people of lesser mental abilities would think.Report
@Scott, This happened in Seattle. There will definitely be a price to pay. I’m assuming people less bright than E.D. and Scott would have a good chance of seeing things as you do.Report
@Scott, back when I was a kid, we had a society where folks in general would take the word of a cop every single time over the word of a kid. Every. Single. Time.
What’s happened between then and now?
I have my theories, of course…Report
@Scott, I’d actually prefer if we, as a society, started issuing punishments such as the “punch to the face” for certain crimes.
Jaywalking == Punch to the Face
Ounce (or less) of Marijuana == Kick to the Butt
Insensitive Reference to Race in Casual Conversation == Indian Burn
Society would turn around pretty damn quick.Report
To be honest I am surprised this is being pointed out as an example of police brutality. Setting violent hands on a lone cop trying to make an arrest with a non-cooperative suspect? What do you think is going to happen?
Obviously not the response we would like to see in a perfect world, but come on, people. There is no need to concern troll this one. This is a long way off from no-knock drug raids and extrajudicial police murders.
She wasn’t getting punched for jaywalking, for Pete’s sake. It happened because she was interfering in an arrest and assaulting an officer.
So yeah. Even though I think jaywalking laws are retarded, and the cop could have handled this better, I am with Mike on this one.Report
The incident happened at a very busy intersection in front of a high school. School administrators had asked police to enforce jaywalking laws because they were concerned about kids’ safety. Officer allowed situation to get out of hand. National news.
Story from the Seattle Times with follow up to the incident. the headline puts it well “Peril, teen swagger collide…”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012146689_pedestrian18m.htmlReport