tasering mom in front of her kids, police lie, as usual

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

via: emptywheel

...But the Gates/Crowley moment appears to have been lost without any intelligent discussion of the rampant abuse of police power and authority. Save for the opinions of Jonathan Turley and Jeff Toobin, which were minimized by MSNBC and CNN television coverage, there was precious little recognition by major media outlets of the root point of police power abuse. Well, the scene in the video attached hereto is what happens in a society that refuses to address overreaching authoritarianism and unrestrained police projection. Moms with kids in minivans get Tasered and roughed up. In front of their children. Why? Because the cops can with relative impunity. The "Blue Line" circles the wagons around their fellow officers, prosecutors need their cooperation for prosecution and trials in actual major cases, and politicians are too cravenly worried about their next election to care. As Digby says:

If this is what they do when they have a video camera rolling in their own car, what do you suppose happens when one isn't?
I guess the taser saved the officer the physical effort of hitting her over the head with his baton or shooting her to gain compliance, so that's good.

MORE

Dash Cam: Mom tasered in front of her kids in New York

A police officer in the Syracuse, New York, area Tasered a 37-year-old mom repeatedly in front of her children during a routine traffic stop—and then arrested the mom, leaving the children alone in their family minivan for 40 minutes in freezing weather.MORe

Comments

[miaryann.livejournal.com]

This issue needs a lot more attention from the media. I want to see tasers banned. This is inexcusable and completely out of control.
They are not being used the way they were supposedly intended- they are not being used INSTEAD OF guns, they are being used whenever a cop wants to be a controlling dick and wield power over someone. A lot of people are dying or being severely injured and cops are still shooting people in the meantime.

[unusualmusic.livejournal.com]

this aint the worst of it. see next post.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

I grew up around cops, so I really don't want to hate them. My mother's cop friends were the barrier between my family and my biological father, so I really really don't want to hate them.

But God, the more I see of this... the more inescapable it is that if my mother hadn't been a white woman working in a courthouse, I'd have seen what everyone else saw... and it'd look a lot like this.

[the-willow.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Y'know, I just keep thinking, if that woman was black and her kids were black no one would have stopped to be a witness, to get her children help by calling their father. No one would have thought the police could possibly have been doing something wrong.

It is loathesome to me that people (general public) become alarmed at police incompetence and brutality when they can suddenly picture themselves in the situation, because the victim is white.