Investigation Launched After Cop Punches Teen Girl At Pride Fest

[Jarhyn]

The officer didn't err in his threat assessment, he was merely being proactive in his job of keeping us safe. Don't you want the police to keep people safe? Why do you hate the police?[/conservoprogressive]

Talk about straw man. Besides, it (sadly) wasn't his job to keep everyone safe. It was his job to keep that asshole protestor safe, and with absolutely awful stakes if he failed. Worse stakes, actually, than the result of beating on an innocent girl. We're talking a lawsuit that would have done massive damage to the police and destroyed the department's ability to prosecute and investigate rapes, murders, and robberies. This will still do damage to that, but not as much as a protestor getting assaulted.

 

[ksen]

Worse stakes, actually, than the result of beating on an innocent girl. We're talking a lawsuit that would have done massive damage to the police and destroyed the department's ability to prosecute and investigate rapes, murders, and robberies. This will still do damage to that, but not as much as a protestor getting assaulted.

Uh, a protestor was assaulted. It's right there in the video.

 

[Nexus]

Besides, it (sadly) wasn't his job to keep everyone safe. It was his job to keep that asshole protestor safe, and with absolutely awful stakes if he failed. Worse stakes, actually, than the result of beating on an innocent girl. We're talking a lawsuit that would have done massive damage to the police and destroyed the department's ability to prosecute and investigate rapes, murders, and robberies. This will still do damage to that, but not as much as a protestor getting assaulted.

You're terrible at legal analysis of liability too. Case law has established many times police are't responsible if they fail to stop crimes. Besides lawsuits don't do massive damage to police. The public pay for them and the police continue with their misconduct.

 

[Metaphor]

I'm gay. I certainly do not have a problem with the girl or her behavior. I am also, however, trained in threat management, assessment, and reaction. You think it's so fucking easy to know what 'right' is in the heat of the moment. You don't seem to want to acknowledge the fact that snap judgements suffer from having to be made by a part of the brain that bypasses rational thought. News flash: when there's an active potential threat, you act first and thinking comes later. It's the difference between being dead or alive at the end of it.

I feel for the girl. The bad guy here is the one who freaked out, screamed that the girl was a threat, and triggered a reaction response.

Uh, no.

If you really believed that, then you would agree that the cop should be put down, like we would any rabid animal.

But I bet you believe the cop should not be put down. He is not an animal. He is responsible for his actions.

 

[Archimedes]

Swingingly wildly and immediately with your fists at people who someone shrilly makes an accusation towards is the obvious and correct thing for a modern professional law enforcement officer to do. Apparently, not lashing out with your fists against the accused in situations like that is a bad thing because the law enforcement agency might be sued for not properly defending the accuser and be prevented from doing it's job of properly upholding the law, protecting the innocent and serving the public trust, so fists first questions later.

At least, I think that's the case being put forth.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'm gay. I certainly do not have a problem with the girl or her behavior. I am also, however, trained in threat management, assessment, and reaction. You think it's so fucking easy to know what 'right' is in the heat of the moment. You don't seem to want to acknowledge the fact that snap judgements suffer from having to be made by a part of the brain that bypasses rational thought. News flash: when there's an active potential threat, you act first and thinking comes later. It's the difference between being dead or alive at the end of it.

I feel for the girl. The bad guy here is the one who freaked out, screamed that the girl was a threat, and triggered a reaction response.

Uh, no.

If you really believed that, then you would agree that the cop should be put down, like we would any rabid animal.

But I bet you believe the cop should not be put down. He is not an animal. He is responsible for his actions.

No. He should neither be put down nor punished. The cop was doing his job. Do you guys even know why that cop was there at that place at that time near those anti-gay protestors? Such protests are generally made by lawsuit trolls, as is made obvious by the AV equipment that several of them were carrying. They were looking to provoke an attack from the celebrants at the event, and they are trained to call for police the second one of them gets approached. I don't know about this particular organization. But it's generally a safe bet that they brief on how to handle police: if you want an officer to attack someone for you, sound panicked, backpedal, and posture as if you are expecting to get struck.

The cop himself is only responsible for acting to stop a perceived threat. The real responsibility is the guy who manipulated the cop into perceiving a false threat. As to identifying a teenage girl, anyone can be a threat. I've known too many people who have been attacked by armed kids to care or even be surprised it. People here seem to expect the cops to be omniscient, able to know everything about a situation in less than a second. But that isn't something anyone can really do, and anyone claiming to have that power is lying through their teeth.

 

[Metaphor]

No. He should neither be put down nor punished. The cop was doing his job.

It's his job to punch people in the stomach? I submit to you that it is not.

Do you guys even know why that cop was there at that place at that time near those anti-gay protestors?

Do you?

Such protests are generally made by lawsuit trolls, as is made obvious by the AV equipment that several of them were carrying. They were looking to provoke an attack from the celebrants at the event, and they are trained to call for police the second one of them gets approached. I don't know about this particular organization. But it's generally a safe bet that they brief on how to handle police: if you want an officer to attack someone for you, sound panicked, backpedal, and posture as if you are expecting to get struck.

Even if I were to imagine for a second -- and I can, because I have a good imagination -- that the cop believed the protester that the girl was making physical threats -- the correct response to this is to handcuff her, not punch her in the stomach three times.

It could have been worse, I suppose. She could have been sitting down, which would have, of course, invited pepper spray.

The cop himself is only responsible for acting to stop a perceived threat. The real responsibility is the guy who manipulated the cop into perceiving a false threat. As to identifying a teenage girl, anyone can be a threat. I've known too many people who have been attacked by armed kids to care or even be surprised it. People here seem to expect the cops to be omniscient, able to know everything about a situation in less than a second. But that isn't something anyone can really do, and anyone claiming to have that power is lying through their teeth.

Oh, I see. The teenage girl could have been armed, so instead of handcuffing her, she had to be punched in the stomach three times.

There is no doubt that if the protester falsely witnessed against her, he is culpable for that -- something like filing a false police report. But a hitman is responsible for murder as surely as the person who paid him, no?

 

[Arctish]

There are two questions that need to be answered:

1) Did the girl do something that warranted her being placed under arrest?

2) Did the girl do something that warranted her being knocked down, pulled back up by her hair, and punched in the gut 3 times before being placed under arrest?

These questions overlap somewhat, but they are separate considerations. If the girl did something for which she could have been arrested, it does not follow that she did something that warranted the beating the cop gave her.

 

[Jarhyn]

From the actual evidence I have seen, the actual evidence that exists, The girl wasn't anything that I would consider knocked down. She was doubled over. The cop probably got a bony elbow or she likely flailed a bit; it happens, but it's hard to tell in a melee if something is accidental or intentional. He needs to be retrained; regardless, this is all meaningless without sitting down and hearing his side of things.

And yes, the mere possibility she was armed means the cop needed to act immediately.

Police brutality happens, as does police harassment and profiling. There are a lot of kids who mind their own business who get gunned down because a cop has a chip on his shoulder. There are beatings like Rodney King where some good old boys get together and decide to beat themselves up a nigger. There are times when neighborhood watch accost teenage boys in hoodies in the rain, shove them down, and then shoot them. Stonewall happened. But this isn't stonewall. It's one bad situation for a cop who by all evidence I have available did his best to try to react to a situation created by an anti-gay bigot who should now be in prison for instigating the beating and arrest of a teenager.

 

[Arctish]

From the actual evidence I have seen, the actual evidence that exists, The girl wasn't anything that I would consider knocked down. She was doubled over. The cop probably got a bony elbow or she likely flailed a bit; it happens, but it's hard to tell in a melee if something is accidental or intentional. He needs to be retrained; regardless, this is all meaningless without sitting down and hearing his side of things.

And yes, the mere possibility she was armed means the cop needed to act immediately.

It's on the longer clip:

Here is the lead up to it

The cop knocks her down at about the 3:10 mark, and he hauls her up by her hair at the 3:15 mark. He then forces her head down and gut-punches her 3 times. It does not appear that she said or did anything that would warrant a beat down like that, and the bystanders all look and sound pretty shocked.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's on the longer clip:

Here is the lead up to it

The cop knocks her down at about the 3:10 mark, and he hauls her up by her hair at the 3:15 mark. He then forces her head down and gut-punches her 3 times. It does not appear that she said or did anything that would warrant a beat down like that, and the bystanders all look and sound pretty shocked.

Let me tell you about a situation involving a soldier in basic training:

In a breaching training exercise, four soldiers in my training unit went through a mock-up of a house in a mock-up of a town. The rifles were... I don't really remember at the time. Paint rounds or airsoft or something on those lines. There were both civilian panels and non-civilian targets. They'd pop up and you would have a fraction of a second to shoot or not.

There were a few doors, some of them locked with a special kind of hasp made for a heavy plastic sheer pin, about the same strength as a modern interior door. Those could only be opened using a portable ram.

Four soldiers would form a breaching team. The goal was to get 100% of unfriendly targets and few-to-no civilian targets. Every group had a round or two in a civilian target by the end of it. In addition, one of the soldiers in charge of manning the ram breached a room and then walked in with his rifle facing the wrong way, not even noticing until after he put the thing down. That particular soldier didn't hear the end of that incident; the soldier in charge of the range it happened on got assigned to my unit, and even three years later talked about that 'idiot soldier who walked in with his rifle backwards'. But I knew the guy it happened to; he was a decent soldier and just got mixed up; and with an m-4, the barrel is as long and only slightly more narrow as the butt, with handle-sized bit going each way. I can certainly see how easy it would be to make the mistake.

Adrenaline reshapes our perceptions, which are already fragile. It's entirely unreasonable to demand that anyone, particularly a cop reacting on behalf of a person calling for his help, be entirely aware of every detail involved. That includes being lenient on his possible failure in identifying that the person he tackled was a teenager.

 

[laughing dog]

It's on the longer clip:

Here is the lead up to it

The cop knocks her down at about the 3:10 mark, and he hauls her up by her hair at the 3:15 mark. He then forces her head down and gut-punches her 3 times. It does not appear that she said or did anything that would warrant a beat down like that, and the bystanders all look and sound pretty shocked.

Let me tell you about a situation involving a soldier in basic training:

In a breaching training exercise, four soldiers in my training unit went through a mock-up of a house in a mock-up of a town. The rifles were... I don't really remember at the time. Paint rounds or airsoft or something on those lines. There were both civilian panels and non-civilian targets. They'd pop up and you would have a fraction of a second to shoot or not.

There were a few doors, some of them locked with a special kind of hasp made for a heavy plastic sheer pin, about the same strength as a modern interior door. Those could only be opened using a portable ram.

Four soldiers would form a breaching team. The goal was to get 100% of unfriendly targets and few-to-no civilian targets. Every group had a round or two in a civilian target by the end of it. In addition, one of the soldiers in charge of manning the ram breached a room and then walked in with his rifle facing the wrong way, not even noticing until after he put the thing down. That particular soldier didn't hear the end of that incident; the soldier in charge of the range it happened on got assigned to my unit, and even three years later talked about that 'idiot soldier who walked in with his rifle backwards'. But I knew the guy it happened to; he was a decent soldier and just got mixed up; and with an m-4, the barrel is as long and only slightly more narrow as the butt, with handle-sized bit going each way. I can certainly see how easy it would be to make the mistake.

Adrenaline reshapes our perceptions, which are already fragile. It's entirely unreasonable to demand that anyone, particularly a cop reacting on behalf of a person calling for his help, be entirely aware of every detail involved. That includes being lenient on his possible failure in identifying that the person he tackled was a teenager.

Police are trained to hold their emotions in check. Police are not permitted to arbitrarily assault anyone in a civilized society. From this video, there is no indication the woman was going to assault anyone. From this video, it appears the police officer's response is both unprofessional and criminal. Now, maybe an investigation will bring out other factors that mitigate this assault. But, there is absolutely nothing in this video that mitigates the officer's response.

 

[beero1000]

It's on the longer clip:

Here is the lead up to it

The cop knocks her down at about the 3:10 mark, and he hauls her up by her hair at the 3:15 mark. He then forces her head down and gut-punches her 3 times. It does not appear that she said or did anything that would warrant a beat down like that, and the bystanders all look and sound pretty shocked.

Let me tell you about a situation involving a soldier in basic training:

In a breaching training exercise, four soldiers in my training unit went through a mock-up of a house in a mock-up of a town. The rifles were... I don't really remember at the time. Paint rounds or airsoft or something on those lines. There were both civilian panels and non-civilian targets. They'd pop up and you would have a fraction of a second to shoot or not.

There were a few doors, some of them locked with a special kind of hasp made for a heavy plastic sheer pin, about the same strength as a modern interior door. Those could only be opened using a portable ram.

Four soldiers would form a breaching team. The goal was to get 100% of unfriendly targets and few-to-no civilian targets. Every group had a round or two in a civilian target by the end of it. In addition, one of the soldiers in charge of manning the ram breached a room and then walked in with his rifle facing the wrong way, not even noticing until after he put the thing down. That particular soldier didn't hear the end of that incident; the soldier in charge of the range it happened on got assigned to my unit, and even three years later talked about that 'idiot soldier who walked in with his rifle backwards'. But I knew the guy it happened to; he was a decent soldier and just got mixed up; and with an m-4, the barrel is as long and only slightly more narrow as the butt, with handle-sized bit going each way. I can certainly see how easy it would be to make the mistake.

Adrenaline reshapes our perceptions, which are already fragile. It's entirely unreasonable to demand that anyone, particularly a cop reacting on behalf of a person calling for his help, be entirely aware of every detail involved. That includes being lenient on his possible failure in identifying that the person he tackled was a teenager.

You have to recognize you have a bad argument when it can literally be used to excuse any non-premeditated action by a police officer.

I mean with all of his adrenaline, in the heat of the moment, he couldn't have known she didn't have an assault rifle, so we shouldn't judge him for pulling his gun and emptying his magazine into the crowd.

 

[Metaphor]

It's one bad situation for a cop who by all evidence I have available did his best to try to react to a situation created by an anti-gay bigot who should now be in prison for instigating the beating and arrest of a teenager.

This is getting increasingly idiotic, Jarhyn. Is there any action at all that the cop could have taken that you would not dismiss as merely 'adrenalin'?

You say he needed to act 'immediately'. Does that mean throwing punches as soon as he comes on the scene? Not a second's pause to make any kind of threat assessment whatever?

The anti-gay bigot used words. Well, 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me', as I was taught in primary school. The anti-gay bigot's words were words.

But the cop let his fists do the talking.

 

[ksen]

Jarhyn, your attitude is part of the problem.

Are you a cop?

 

[KeepTalking]

The officer didn't err in his threat assessment, he was merely being proactive in his job of keeping us safe. Don't you want the police to keep people safe? Why do you hate the police?[/conservoprogressive]

Talk about straw man. Besides, it (sadly) wasn't his job to keep everyone safe.

Bullshit, it is exactly his job to keep everyone safe. He is not a private security guard hired by the preacher, he is a public servant charged with upholding the law for every citizen in his jurisdiction.

It was his job to keep that asshole protestor safe, and with absolutely awful stakes if he failed. Worse stakes, actually, than the result of beating on an innocent girl. We're talking a lawsuit that would have done massive damage to the police and destroyed the department's ability to prosecute and investigate rapes, murders, and robberies. This will still do damage to that, but not as much as a protestor getting assaulted.

You don't think this is going to end up in a lawsuit? I guarantee you that it will, and there is much more culpability for the police department when it is their officer doing the assaulting, as opposed to one citizen assaulting another.

It's on the longer clip:

Here is the lead up to it

The cop knocks her down at about the 3:10 mark, and he hauls her up by her hair at the 3:15 mark. He then forces her head down and gut-punches her 3 times. It does not appear that she said or did anything that would warrant a beat down like that, and the bystanders all look and sound pretty shocked.

Let me tell you about a situation involving a soldier in basic training:

In a breaching training exercise, four soldiers in my training unit went through a mock-up of a house in a mock-up of a town. The rifles were... I don't really remember at the time. Paint rounds or airsoft or something on those lines. There were both civilian panels and non-civilian targets. They'd pop up and you would have a fraction of a second to shoot or not.

There were a few doors, some of them locked with a special kind of hasp made for a heavy plastic sheer pin, about the same strength as a modern interior door. Those could only be opened using a portable ram.

Four soldiers would form a breaching team. The goal was to get 100% of unfriendly targets and few-to-no civilian targets. Every group had a round or two in a civilian target by the end of it. In addition, one of the soldiers in charge of manning the ram breached a room and then walked in with his rifle facing the wrong way, not even noticing until after he put the thing down. That particular soldier didn't hear the end of that incident; the soldier in charge of the range it happened on got assigned to my unit, and even three years later talked about that 'idiot soldier who walked in with his rifle backwards'. But I knew the guy it happened to; he was a decent soldier and just got mixed up; and with an m-4, the barrel is as long and only slightly more narrow as the butt, with handle-sized bit going each way. I can certainly see how easy it would be to make the mistake.

Cool story, bro. Too bad it has fuck all to do with the situation we are discussing. On a related note, I remember this one time when I was a kid playing cops and robbers...

Adrenaline reshapes our perceptions, which are already fragile. It's entirely unreasonable to demand that anyone, particularly a cop reacting on behalf of a person calling for his help, be entirely aware of every detail involved. That includes being lenient on his possible failure in identifying that the person he tackled was a teenager.

No, it is perfectly reasonable to expect a cop to keep a more level head than your average citizen when the shit starts to hit the fan. A cop who cannot do so has no legitimate reason to wear the badge. He does not have to be cognizant of every detail involved, but I would damn sure expect him to know whether or not an assault is currently in progress.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Jarhyn, your attitude is part of the problem.

Are you a cop?

Jarhyn thinks cops are sociopaths. That blaming a cop for what he did is like being angry at a shark for biting something.

 

[ksen]

So he is a cop.

 

[Jarhyn]

More like being angry at a dog for biting someone when their handler reacts badly to them. Or blaming a shark for biting when it smells blood. You train someone to react immediately to a perceived attack, along with a media that makes us paranoid about attacks, and then marvel in stupidity when someone actually acts.

If you can't understand why my story about (a skilled person) not being able to (perceive important details) in a situation of (heightened adrenaline), the same essential situation that the cop was in, applies to the cop, then you are the blind one here. Even the ability to discern friend or foe in such stressful situations is shoddy at best, hence why the kid that pops out of the closet in that scenario was shot dead 3 in 4 groups.

 

[James Brown]

It's simple. Find a potential threat, then use immediate and unrestrained force to prevent a future attack. Get them before they can get you.

It's just the Bush Doctrine, and it's worked so well for us in Iraq.