Is police brutality slowly creeping up in the US?

Excessive force is using more force than the situation requires to subdue a suspect.

The police should not be above the law.

This is why citizen review boards were created.

Give this a listen. Dramatization aside, it makes some excellent points.

No one is above the law. Police in the United States do not treat everyone the same. The police in Alabama will act more aggressively towards a coloured person than a white person for example. Police in the UK are better paid and more respected than police in the USA and they treat all citizens equally. Police in the UK don’t have to carry guns. Aggressive brutal policing is one of the first signs of a dictatorship.

Police brutality is nothing new. It was around and known about even when I was a kid. Only thing was there were less camera phones to capture the event.
I think phyical force should be used only when the person is resisting arrest in such a way that they are phyically endangering or harming the officer. Not because the person is yelling. Unless they are yelling threats about doing phyical harm to the cops.

Frankly, with the attitude that LEOs have to put up with on a regular basis, I’m rather surprised that more if them don’t administer many more richly deserved beatings in the course of their work day.

It has been my experience that for the most part if you treat a LEO politely they will tend to treat you politely in return. If, OTOH, you respond to the LEO with something along the lines of “why the hell should I comply with you, you f*ing pig!”, you are quite a bit more likely to receive a bit of attitude in return.

Only one comment. There are many factors at work that are pinpointing certain officers for their death. This is not just in one state, but in all the states. Officers are on high alert, not only for the safety of the public, but safety for themselves and their families.

Please keep this in mind.

@flutherother Police brutality may not be as common on the surface in the UK but the 2009 incident of the death of Ian Tomlinson is a telling tale of the ubiquity of state sanctioned violence.
The thing to note is even when the police are finally accused after several corrective postmortems, the charge is only manslaughter and not murder.

Police brutality slowly creeping? Where have you been? It has always been, it is just the cat that John Q has a way to video it that a lot of what cops got away with is unknowingly flushed into the light. And it is not just prevalent in one location either, http://youtu.be/DGpjBGgNSUs, http://youtu.be/alC9LhrYwC0, and http://youtu.be/Q6MKuKJ9Kws. And apparently not just certain ages; old, young, you can be a target, even in jail. IA is a joke, they are all in bed together. The only time they will actually do anything is if the media makes such a stink that they have to do something. A cop will do an assault, and there will be some horse and pony show to say, ”Look, we are handling it” then when the media goes away s slap on the wrist or they go work somewhere else. If it were a teacher making inappropriate remarks or texts to a student would people say “Well, he/she did something stupid, we should not let those few moments where no one was hurt ruin a 12yr teaching career, everyone deserves a second chance”. Too bad there are so many douche bag cops tainting the name of the good ones. I guess maybe some cops figure they got their butts kicked on the school yard one too many times and now they have a badge they can try to make up for it.

@atlantis – the question of whether you can charge someone with murder is whether or not you can establish – or even suspect – that the assailant intended to kill the victim.

I don’t believe this is borne out by the videos. It’s clear that the officer responsible intended to hurt Tomlinson – but kill? No.

Shooting peoples’ dogs in their kennels, throwing flashbangs in little girls’ laps, and shooting Marines 71 times is brutal enough, thank you very much.

@the100thmonkey I am aware of the legal technicality. But analyse that with respect to the context. They were going to hurt a lot of people to stop them from exercising a civilian right of peaceful protest. But where do you draw the line between excessive force and an act of duty. The court sentencing for manslaughter only re-enforces the fact that police officers just get off easy. A just law would hold the officer in even greater contempt of duty due to his status as a government designated protector and peacekeeper.

The term for this is the banality of evil. Just as Eichmann cleared himself of all responsibility for administrating Nazi camps on the grounds that he was just “following orders”, this is the exact reverberation of such a conveniently apathetic POV stemming from formal sanction.

Stripping away someone’s conscience and give him a license for violence with no accountability is a surefire formula for de-humanising people.

As someone once said, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

@flutherother That attitude is not just a Southern thing. I’m sure the police in Boston, Chicago, LA are just as hostile toward minorities as they are in the South.

@cletrans2col I’m sure you are right. I only have experience from Alabama.
@atlantis The case of Ian Tomlinson is an unfortunate one. The policeman should not have pushed Ian Tomlinson but the consequences of the push went way beyond what might have been foreseen. I can’t accept this incident is an example of state sanctioned violence.

Slowly creeping up? They have been overstepping their boundaries for years. Not all police of course. It is getting much worse much faster now.

Yep, not a new phenomenon.

Slowly creeping? lol no, I’d say it’s been holding strong for several decades….just because you don’t hear about something, doesn’t mean it isnt a very common occurrence.

@incendiary_dan if anything, people should watch the story shown 11 minutes into the video, absolutely chilling

@cletrans2col You’re right. I’ve actually seen more brutality towards ethnic minorities in South Dakota and Minnesota than all my 18 years in Alabama. What I did see and hear about in Alabama was police brutality towards child abusers and rapists.
I think on-the-job brutality is about the same, if not better than 50 years ago because the accused do have rights and they fight for their rights today. What I have seen a scary, scary, scary increase in is the SWAT/Military style takedowns or house busts that end up in wrong houses or like this These types of takedowns have killed too many innocents- including an 80 year old woman in a wrong house.
There is one reporter who is tracking the epidemic of SWAT takedowns.

While it’s not new there seems to be a rise in military-style operations especially related to the ‘drug war’. Federal subsidies to state and local police departments for the ‘drug war’ have leaned them all toward bash-the-door-down-shoot-first-ask-later solutions.

@linguaphile I hadn’t seen your mention of SWAT-style tactics but that exactly what I meant, and it’s way out of hand.

@cletrans2col “That attitude is not just a Southern thing” you got that right. I have a friend in LA who is used to being pulled over all the time basically for ‘driving while black’. There was some fuss recently in NYC about police policies in the ‘outer boroughs’ (Bronx / Brooklyn) where folks have been stopped and searched basically for hanging around. They are not coincidentally areas of higher minority population. There was some ‘review’ but as far as I know the police get away with that.

Another couple interesting links: this and this.

and the liberals still think that cops should be the only one’s who keep guns, really guys?

Someone can say they were brutalized even when the officer put the hands on him / her. While others do not mind if they get smacked around a bit when they know they did something wrong. The line between applying the law and using excessive force is so thin one can’t really say what’s what.

Here I’d like to see how JP dealt with some similar issues. I’ma ask him ^^

I agree that police brutality is an awful thing. I think it is probably just more publicized today than it once was.

But I have been helped by police officers quite a few times. Once when I locked myself out of my car and once when this guy was bothering me. I think that they mostly try to do the right thing and look out for people.

It is so much easier to complain about the bad than be thankful for the good.

I don’t think it’s creeping up, I think to some extent it’s been less brazen, more covert.

My last husband was a cop, so I saw a great deal that went on – much more than the general public sees. He & his friends (fellow officers) all were on ego trips & rarely ever passed up the opportunity to man-handle a suspect (accidentally, of course!). Their victims were, almost universally, not white (hispanic, african-american, native american). They were much more likely to make traffic stops for non-whites than they were for whites. Not only that, they were every bit as crooked as the ‘criminals’ they were catching (a little bit of everything, including slashing tires). Too many Police now seem to hit first & then ask questions. Needless to say, the marriage did not last.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that people who are brutalized by cops “were asking for it” but I tend to disagree. Of course, if a person attacks the cop, said cop needs to defend themselves. But cursing a cop out? Being rude? I don’t think those things call for police brutality. It might not be pleasant nor called for, but if you’re a cop, you usually aren’t expecting to deal with all of the most polite folks in town; you should be able to control your rage even if the person does deserve to be attacked because you are in the position of authority and are supposed to be above acting like a criminal.
The force required should be all that is used – nothing more.

How many cops does it take to throw a man down a flight of stairs?.....none, “he tripped”.

@cheebdragon zzzzzzing!