We deserve better.
From the Addicting info write-up:
I’ll be the first to admit, when it comes to the police, I am the beneficiary of White Privilege. I’ve never been stopped, harassed and certainly never arrested. Obviously, I’ve never been assaulted by a police officer either. So the reality of how badly the police behave has never really been part ofmy reality. The few times it did intrude, by way of my noticeably Hispanic father being bothered for not being white, I was too young to understand it.
However, since the spread of cell phone cameras, I, and more importantly, White America, have gotten quite a good look at just how the police behave when they think no one is paying attention. Worse, we’re starting to see that they don’t care that anyone is watching because they think they can illegally confiscate the cameras or they just won’t get in any real trouble. There’s a tipping point coming where the public becomes fed up with an increasingly militarized and violent police force and the ubiquitous nature of smart phones is bringing it on faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.
And Melissa McEwan’s write up is, predictably, fantastic:
Here’s the thing: Jermaine Green is hero. And what we’re going to talk about is how he’s a hero, not just because he filmed an incident of police brutality against a disabled woman, and not just because he refused to hand over the video to the deputy whom he’d just filmed, but because he is a man of color who did these things at the same personal risk any of us would face in standing up to police, plus the fuckload of additional risk because he is a man of color, and did them even when the white police deputy was being racist right in his face. (White men are not typically asked, “Do you have any warrants?” by police.)
What we’re not going to talk about is how not all cops are bad (I know; my grandfather was a cop), nor are we going to talk about how hard cops’ jobs are (I know that, too), nor about some supposed additional difficulty of dealing with mentally disabled people (because fuck that and look at the video where he punches her in the face for no reason, and no, “she’s a constant pain in my ass” isn’t a reason). We’re not going to defend that bullying fuckery in this space.
