8 years ago
17
A black pedestrian was stopped by police. A bystander recorded his ‘humiliating’ arrest.
The woman stopped her car in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Edina, one of Minnesota’s wealthiest suburbs. Just moments before, she had passed a black man who had been walking on the shoulder of the street, seemingly to avoid construction along the sidewalk. After passing the man, the woman noticed an unmarked police car behind her activate its lights. The vehicle pulled in front of the pedestrian and cut him off...
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So many lies. So much bullshit. That cop violated that man's civil rights. The other cop is an accomplice. They need to be prosecuted for their crimes, then they need to lose their job and pension. When cops start paying the price for their actions, their actions will change. The bullshit we currently enjoy is 100% due to lack of accountability on the part of police.
Come on, which country do you live in? Walking while black is a crime deserving the highest punishment!
Sarcasm aside, the bigger problem is not so much racism but the fact that police seem to have the right to destroy anyone's life gratuitously without any consequences. And that includes killing them.
Sorry, but that cop showed more restraint than I would have.
And if you were the one being rousted for walking down the street?
IF the cop was polite, I'd get off the street. I don't know what led to the outburst, it's not here in the video. The guy looked not right to me, at least from the behavior. Would you go off on a cop if he just asked you to stop walking in the street?
Once upon a time I was at a relative's house when they were away and went to a neighbor's house to borrow something. The neighbor, whom I knew well, wasn't home, but their kid was visiting, whom I didn't know. Now, I don't know what the kid was thinking but after I left, he called the police and reported a stranger'd cpme to his door. Odd, because I'd known those folks for years and he'd never been around. Later, I heard this was something he'd done many times before. Anyway, the first I knew of it, here're a couple of sheriff's deputies coming at me with their guns drawn.
To answer your question, no, I didn't go off on them. I'm not an idiot, I hadn't been drinking, I've got respect for the law, can look people in the eye and wasn't looking to get shot right then. They were polite enough, unless you count drawing down on me as rude. I wasn't too busy to let them put me under submission, interrogate me and check out my story.
Ultimately, after an hour or so on the ground with my hands cuffed behind my back, and my story checking out better than that creep that tried to get me killed, they let me be. One of the deputies, who turned out to be a friend of the family, sent word later that he was sorry about the whole thing. I had a strongly worded conversation with the kid a month or two after that.
We don't know what we don't know about this confrontation. I can imagine it was something like what happened to me. Still, from what we do know, the pedestrian doesn't seem to've done anything wrong. To my mind, the cop is the one escalating. I don't buy his claim he wants to have a conversation about the pedestrian's behavior. He's gone beyond maintaining a command bearing and into intimidation. He's sweating the guy, and seems to think panicking him is getting him somewhere. Reminds me of the pointless arrest of Sandra Bland that led to her death. Power tripping cop power tripping.
It could be that. There are certainly bad cops out there.
I'm not black, so I will never get to have that experience. HOWEVER, if I were black and I was walking down the street, doing nothing wrong, and a cop started to harass me, yeah, I'd probably let him have a piece of my mind.
I was under the impression he was walking in the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. I thought this is what this prompted the whole thing. Sure, If he's just walking down the sidewalk and this happened, I would be petty pissed off. If I was walking off of the sidewalk and in the street, where I could be hit and a cop said get on the sidewalk, I'd get out of the street. It's not a black thing, it's a common sense thing.
I understood it to be that the sidewalk was blocked off because of construction so the pedestrian is on the edge of the road, walking the white line closest the sidewalk. The passerby drives past the guy with no problem, then sees the cop intercept the pedestrian in her rear view. According to the witness, the bit about walking in the middle of the street is the cop blatantly lying.
Then the cop is an @#%hole
The pedestrian's a fool for panicking that way, but people have a way of getting killed whether they do or don't cooperate. Somewhere off camera, I suspect, are townies that saw the guy walking and called the cops. Like the time someone called the cops on me: what did they say that brought the cops down so heavily like that? Their responsibility for this is non-zero.
Yea....over reacting to an overacting cop is never a good formula for a peaceful outcome.
Now we're on the same page.
Some day you may find me on some other page you never read before. I will remember you said this when we may disagree, and still be, we, together, on the same page.
Works for me.
Then we are on the same page