Huffington Post – by Ryan Grim
The ubiquity of cellphone, dashcam and surveillance video has transformed the way the public understands police violence. But as scene after scene unfolds on shaky screens and in grainy contours, another element of the violence is beginning to come into focus: the pattern of officers showing no concern for the person they have shot, often fatally.
The nonchalance around the injured and the dying is stunning in its own way.
Set aside the question of whether the shooting was justified, either legally or morally. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the officer had no other choice. Even in such a situation, though, the officer has just exercised the most terrifying of powers ― the use of lethal force against another human being. And yet no care is taken of that human being.
Consider the most recent shooting caught on video: that of Charles Kinsey, who fortunately survived. Kinsey, a black behavioral therapist in North Miami, was trying to help a man with autism who was sitting in the street blocking traffic. A cellphone video shows Kinsey himself lying on the ground with his hands in the air. He was trying to explain to police that the other man had a toy truck and not a gun, contrary to what a 911 caller had reported.
One of the officers fired three times, shooting Kinsey in the leg. Then he said he was handcuffed and left bleeding on the street for 20 minutes before an ambulance arrived.
And this was a case in which the police understood, right from the start, that the man they shot was the victim.
Letting the body lie there is a fairly common trend in these high-profile police shootings. After Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police shot and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, on July 5, the officers appeared rattled by what had happened. But as for Sterling, they said to “just leave him,” according to a witness.
In Ferguson, Missouri, officers left Mike Brown’s body in the street for four hours, an indignity that protesters have referred to often.
Cedrick Chatman was shot four times, within 10 seconds, as he ran from officers on the south side of Chicago. Then they handcuffed the dying teen, and an officer placed his boot on top of him.
After officers shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the child was still alive. Even when they realized he was just a kid with a toy gun, they still failed to offer basic medical assistance. (They have since said they thought his toy gun was real and were afraid for their lives.) Instead, when his 14-year-old sister, T.R., ran toward him crying out, “My baby brother, they killed my baby brother,” one of the officers tackled her. She tried to get up and crawl toward her dying brother, but the second officer dragged her down. She was handcuffed and put in the backseat of a car, left to watch her brother continue to bleed while the officers did nothing.
“When Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, heard about the shooting and rushed to the park, the officers refused to release T.R. into her custody and told her she had to choose between going to the hospital with her fatally wounded 12-year-old son and staying with her handcuffed 14-year-old daughter, who was in the back of the car with the very same officers who had shot her son,” the Rice family’s lawyers have since written.
On Dec. 28, an Ohio grand jury chose not to indict the officer who fatally shot Tamir.
When a Tulsa, Oklahoma, reserve deputy accidentally shot 44-year-old Eric Harris, he was already being subdued by other officers. “Oh shit, he shot me!” Harris says in the video. “I’m losing my breath.”
“F#@k your breath,” one officer says in response, among the last words Harris would ever hear.
If black lives truly mattered, the police would make an attempt to save the dying. If black lives truly mattered, the dead would be afforded more dignity. It is this lack of caring for a fellow human being in his last moments, over and above the violence itself, that reinforces the belief that black lives don’t matter.
After shooting LaQuan McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke can be seen in the video meandering about the crime scene. When North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, he casually walked toward his body. Later, more officers stand around Scott, and it takes some time for any of them to check for a pulse.
Videos of police behaving nonchalantly after shooting white people have also come to light. Andrew Thomas, driving drunk, flipped his car and his passenger was thrown from the vehicle. Paradise, California, police officer Patrick Feaster witnessed the crash and pulled up behind them. Instead of attending to the passenger or helping Thomas out of the car, he simply drew his weapon, aimed, fired and struck Thomas in the neck, all in a matter of seconds. Then he radioed that the driver was refusing to exit the car, not mentioning for 11 minutes that he had shot him.
Almost instantly after confronting Kajieme Powell in St. Louis, police shot him. Then they rolled over his body to put him in handcuffs. “They’re putting him in cuffs. He’s dead. Oh my God,” one bystander can be heard saying in a video of the incident. “Now they cuffin’ him, he’s already dead.”
In fact, in reviewing nearly every publicly available video of a police shooting over the past year or so, it is close to impossible to find footage of an officer aiding the person who has been shot.
Video of 25-year-old Freddie Gray’s arrest shows him screaming out, possibly in pain, as he is placed in the back of a Baltimore police van. Knowledge of what happened inside the van is limited, at best. But prosecutors have argued in cases against several of the six officers charged in Gray’s death that not buckling his seatbelt was a mistake, whether intentional or not, that contributed to the severity of his injuries. William Porter, whose first trial ended in a mistrial, has also been accused of failing to ensure that Gray was provided immediate medical assistance once he requested help.
That lackluster response, as much as the rough ride, might have cost Gray his life.
It’s this nonchalance that gives weight to claims that too many police officers are operating more like law enforcement warriors than like public servants dedicated to the protection of others. Couple this with officers’ unwillingness to publicly shoulder any moral responsibility in these deaths, and we can only conclude that they believe victims have invited death upon themselves.
Valid points are made here. And there’s yet another to be drawn from this fact:
*** The ubiquity of cellphone, dashcam and surveillance video has transformed the way the public understands police violence. ***
It has also provided more proof of the Blue Wall of Silence.
When a pig stomps on the head of a suspect who’s lying motionless on the ground in handcuffs, or executes an unarmed man who’s running away, he KNOWS that any of his “brothers” who see it happen in person, or on camera later on, will not arrest him. He also knows that the local prosecutor’s office almost certainly won’t bring charges unless the case gets massive publicity.
If every pig didn’t know that ALL of his “brother officers” were corrupt in this way, the fear of arrest would prevent many of the sort of horrendous crimes we’ve seen pigs commit in broad daylight, where cameras were likely to be recording, and/or in direct view of other police.
This is just another way we know that there’s no such thing as a “good cop.” It would be bad enough if they “only” enforced tyrannical laws against victimless crimes, but their code of silence is what really defines them as the Blue Mafia.
The Gestapo are trained to act this way. They are trained by jew land. What you do is just like the military, de humanize the person and it is easy to murder
If the coproaches are in fear of their lives so often, why are they doing that job? They are policy enforcers. Emphasis on enforcers. It must also be in their policies that the peasants are not allowed to see, that they can shoot peasants.