Posted on 07/30/2008 10:57:36 AM PDT by LibWhacker
So, if you are jay walking, a cop is justified in hitting you with his billy club without commanding you to stop? If you do a slow and go, he can ram your car before he even hits the lights? I hope this JBT goes to jail for a very long time.
Neither side in this police action behaved in a civil manner.
The criminal on the bike does NOT support civil society. That is why he was riding with the “ACT UP” of the bicycle community.
Watch the video again carefully. Watch what Long does at the very last second. Pogan was fully justified in decking that POS. If it had been me, I would’ve REALLY put a hit on him for pulling that crap!
If a flash mob of 20 sprinters runs you down on the sidewalk, is that willful assault? Or a “friendly prank”?
If I’m jay walking, and a police officer asks me to stop, I will. If I refuse, then the cop has a right to make me stop.
I don’t care if those bike riding a-holes in Critical mass get run over by a city plow.
They pick one out, but they don’t do it by ramming his vehicle. However, the cop could have ordered any number of them to stop, instead he chose to “teach them a lesson”. t is not the cop’s job to dish out punishment.
You’re right.
Does anybody think the guy dove off his bike and onto the sidewalk, unlawfully pulling the cop after and on top of him?
I’m thinking of a longshoremen’s strike in SF back in the 30’s when the media reported that some strikers threw themselves onto the bayonets of national guardsmen.
Yes, but the cop did NOTHING to try to stop the guy other than slam him to the ground. I guess you would be okay if the police got your attention by hitting you up the side of the head before he wrote you a ticket because you are advocating nothing less than legalized police terrorism.
Yes, but it doesn’t look like a storm drain to me. There is no grating in it, as you’d expect to see in a storm drain, which could cause a cyclist to crash. No, it looks like a solid, metal utility access door of some kind to me. A little rough to roll over on a bike, granted, but not a reason to choose instead to ram a cop.
Not true. Pogan moved to intercept him. It was obvious. I mean, after you've broken the law and you see a cop rapidly closing the distance between him and you, you know what to do -- and it's not to try to escape or to try to ram the cop.
I have no opinion either way. But I wonder if the cop saw something behind the “cameraman” that we didn’t see. We do see the cop watch the bicyclist come at him. We can’t see what the cop was watching.
i know that is a stretch of an analogy, but just hear me out.
i have worked these demonstrations a number of times. you can yell "stop" until you are blue in the face. they will not stop for a cop on foot.
IF this bicyclist was weaving in an extreme manner, moreso than the other cyclists, he should have been stopped and ticketed. was this level of force necessary? not sure. i wasn't there. i would like to see the entire encounter.
One thing we don’t know is whether or not the officer got a call from another officer with instructions to stop this guy.
I watched the vid 10 times and what u say happened didn’t happen. You want to see it, you hope its true, but it isn’t. And yes as a matter of fact I am an expert in video as well as digital photos. What you see did not happen. What u call the “last second” actually occurred AFTER the cop had his forearm raised and his body in motion toward the cyclist. Elapsed time of the entire “swerve” before impact initiated be the cop was .162 seconds. If the cop can react to that he needs to be in the NFL cause that’s as fast as you blink.
I think you are right about the lack of storm drain grating, but every additional time I look at the video in full screen mode, I see the cop move quicker to intercept the biker in order that he can deck the biker. If the cop fell to his knees, I’d have to suggest that it was the momentum of his exploding into the biker that caused the fall. JMO.
NO, we see the cop moving towards the curb while watching the cyclist. Then we see the cyclist move even further to the curb to try to avoid him. At the last instance, we see the cyclists brace for impact as the cop strikes him.
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