She "said" something. Not "she DID something", but she "said" something that justifies a large cop busting her in the mouth over it?
For me, the justification for decking her for SAYING something would have to meet a high standard of threat. If she was saying "Come on people! Let's rush these pigs!", then that would be one thing, where failing to terminate her agitation immediately would have lead to violence.
On the other hand, if all that happened was she called the cop a "[n-word] pig" or something else personally insulting, then he would have no more right to punch her out over it than a non-cop would.
Cops are city employees doing a job. They are not the nobility. They are not samurai with the right to cut off the heads of uppity peasants. They need to remember that.
I know that I have the common sense to tell when a police officer has done us proud.
This aint it. This is the opposite pole, from it.
The cop didn’t kill anybody, and the woman’s going to recover. Recover physically, and also going to recover cash money...IMO she’d win this court case in any state in the land, and rightly so.
But, what may or may not recover, is what standard this sets in what we expect from LEO’s in general. If we took the post of this thread as a slice of the greater public opinion, then there must be a sizable fraction of the countries population that thinks 250# of police officer can assault 110# of citizen, when that citizen is committing no crime, and the fact that citizen is a woman, not only doesn’t help her, in this court of opinion, I think it hurts her. I don’t think I would have seen half of the incredibly prejudicial comments and fantastic interpretations of her behavior, if it’d been a 250# cop knocking out a 110# man... bearing in mind, a male 110# would not be a man, that would be a boy still in elementary school. If this had been male on male violence, with an attacker double the victim’s size, I don’t think the fact that the person committing the assault had a badge would carry as much weight... it would just be a matter of right and wrong, and what was right would be more clear.
Somehow the fact that the victim is a woman, is bringing these bizarre interpretations of her behavior, “she wasn’t walking right”, “she wasn’t talking right”, “she was hopping on her feet”, “she looked agitated, therefore she’s an agitator” (that progression of logic was strange), all the way to claiming that there was some huge all enveloping conspiracy to frame this police officer, and that this woman was some kind of Puerto Rican Mata Hari who somehow machinated the incident and faked her injuries in a deep ploy to influence the upcoming elections??
I have never seen grown men jump through so many hoops, and present so many bizarre excuses that would not only exonerate this beast with a badge, but to somehow formulate an alternate reality where a cop asserting his dominance by beating down a defenseless woman is, in their little private worlds, a hero. Someone they look up to, someone they even envy, someone who is finally addressing what they hold in their hearts to be a long hidden grievance or wrong.
I think what lies at the center of this big dance around the truth, these twists of semantics, jack-in-the-box theories and clairvoyant interpretations from armchair swamis, is this: The fact that this woman is innocent of any crime, doesn’t even weigh in their thinking. They put an ounce on the scale on the side of this police officer, simply because he’s a police officer. They put a pound on the scale, on the side of this police officer, because a woman shouldn’t have been where she was, she shouldn’t walk like she walked, and possibly, she shouldn’t have talked like she talked. To put it in one simple term that everyone understands, they saw her as being “uppity”. And every insecure man who viewed this clip, saw a “man” finally take an “uppity” woman under control, in a way that they’ve always wished they could do, but are afraid to. Finally these little women-fearing men get some pay back... this woman beating cop has addressed some inner scale of justice in their tiny little hearts, and that’s why he’s a hero, and why they’re willing to imagine that the sky is green, and the sun rises in the west, in order to make him one. Because if he’s not a hero, but a bully and a coward, then so are they.
And until someone comes up with some hard evidence that she’s a mastermind from the Puerto Rican Al Quaeda faking a beatdown at a family event in some byzantine plot to take control of the elections, I’m seeing the statements on this board as revealing what’s in the hearts of some men, rather than what actually happened at this parade. And that’s the name of that tune.
I’m concerned about the standard we’re teaching the next generation to expect from their peace officers...I sympathize with, and as a man, apologize to the women who are wondering what happened to the men in this country.