Unfortunately for the cop, a neighbor caught the whole thing on her cellphone, and the cop’s actions are now under investigation. The woman, who frequently records police activity, is no stranger to police abuse. She has hired a lawyer and is going to sue. As usual, taxpayers will pay, and little or nothing will happen to the bully cop. You can read a news story about this incident, which happened Sunday in a Los Angeles suburb, here.
America’s police are out of control. They’re killing unarmed people, some of them innocent (including kids), they’re bullying and intimidating citizens who’ve done nothing wrong, and they’re falsely charging people, lying on police reports, planting evidence, and sending innocent people to prison. This is happening because the wrong people are being hired to be cops, their training emphasizes use of violence, they’re not being effectively supervised, and police departments are adopting military tactics. The root cause of all these problems is laws giving police criminal and civil immunity, and lack of citizen control over their police departments, resulting in a near-total breakdown of the accountability system. Large swaths of the public, especially in minority communities, is losing all respect for the police, whose very legitimacy is now on the line.
Things must change before we turn into a police state where cops go to war against ordinary law-abiding citizens. Bad cops must be removed from police forces, and violations of citizens’ rights must have meaningful repercussions, or citizens will have no rights. The police aren’t going to give us our rights back; we must take them back. It’s time to show the police we’re their bosses, not the other way around. We’ve got to put pressure on politicians to change laws and sack police officials who can’t or won’t control their subordinates’ behavior. Nothing less than our lives and freedoms are at stake.