Kops on kamera are scary kops

So here we have an incident of a Chicago area police officer beating a man pretty seriously [concussion, extensive bruising and stitches in his right ear] and shooting another with a Tazer. He said the driver was drunk and resisted arrest. Yeah. Pretty common, right? You know how drunk people act.

There's a problem though - this pig taped all of it, and the only parts that happened were the beating and Tazing. It's pretty indisputable. Watch:

Whoops, pig. Whoops. You went off on a couple of people for the hell of it, and filmed yourself doing it. Fucking brilliant. It seems really stupid, right? Well, I would imagine that it happens all the time. The only reason he got caught - "The incident was discovered when a department official was reviewing the arrests from the previous night and saw a booking photo of Bell [the guy who caught the beating] with his head wrapped in a thick bandage..."

Here are the highlights, from a thorough article:

The seven-minute video released by prosecutors showed that Bell didn't appear to act in a threatening or aggressive manner toward the officer. Instead, he appeared compliant and calm even as the officer used a stun gun on Stalbaum [passenger], who collapsed in a heap on Bell's front porch.

As Bell and Stalbaum got out of the vehicle, Mandarino[pig] can be seen in the video -- which has no audio -- pointing his firearm at them. Bell almost immediately sat back down in the driver's seat, and the officer moved toward Stalbaum as he stood on the front porch of the residence.

Authorities said Mandarino then used a stun gun on Stalbaum. The video shows him collapse. At that point, Bell stood up from the car and placed his hands behind his head. For the next 90 seconds, Bell stood at the side of his vehicle with his hands either in the air or clasped behind his head.

The video showed Mandarino extend a collapsible metal baton as he ordered Bell to the ground. Bell immediately dropped to his knees with his hands behind his head and his face turned downward. Mandarino then pushed Bell forward to his hands and knees and began striking him repeatedly.

Man, he stepped to them right away at gunpoint. Cause the guy spun his tires and then went home. The pig says all he did was spin his tires. That's why he pulled him over.

It's rough watching him take that beating. What can you do though? If you aren't a pacifist, you'll become one real quick once a pig starts dealing on you. Otherwise, you're getting hospitalized at best, and definitely locked up on felony assault charges.

In this case, the filthy pig is getting charged with felonious assault. This is great. I hope they get him. The brother of the guy who really got beaten puts it well:

"We're elated," Stacey Bell said of Mandarino's arrest. The pavement outside the home remains stained from his brother's blood, he said. "We don't feel vindicated yet. If he loses his badge and loses his job and goes to jail, then I'll feel vindicated."

This guy must have done this a lot. I doubt that after fifteen years on the force he just goes haywire one day and starts handing out beatdowns left and right. Fuck these pigs. They're all a bunch of lying trash.

This brings me to another point - the police lie. "Lie" is a noun in this case, not a verb. Of course they do lie, but the police have a particular lie, a scheme to call their own. It is THE police lie. What is this police lie? I will quote extensively from civil liberties lawyer Paul Chevigny's brilliant 1969 work on NYPD police brutality, Police Power:

The worst problem in street-corner incidents is not that of police quarreling with citizens. Most such quarrels, while never admirable, are at least understandable; they are much like quarrels between private citizens. The worst abuse is not even the police hitting people in such quarrels; pugnacious citizens hit others in private disputes every day. The root problem is the abuse of power, the fact that the police not only hit a man but arrest him. Once they have arrested him, of course, lying becomes an inevitable part of the procedure of making the quarrel look like a crime, and thus the lie is the chief abuse with which we must come to grips. If the police simply hit a man and let him go, there would be an abuse of the authority conferred by the uniform and the stick, but not the compound abuse of hitting a man and then dragging him to court on criminal charges, really a more serious injury than a blow. One’s head heals up, after all, but a criminal record never goes away. There is no more embittering experience in the legal system than to be abused by the police and then to be tried and convicted on false evidence...

Despite these obvious repercussions upon community relations, it is rarely that anyone is abused without being criminally charged, not only because of the rationale for such abuses (“he was guilty anyhow”) but because the policeman is likely to get into trouble if he lets an abused person go free. There is nothing to cover a later accusation of abuse if an arrest has not been made...

The can be no doubt that police lying is the most pervasive of all abuses…In the police canon of ethics, the lie is justified in the same way as the arrest: as a vindication of police authority, by proving that defiance of the police is a crime in fact if not in law. A member of a pariah group, or anyone who defies the police, being guilty at heart and sometimes potentially guilty in fact, deserves to be punished out of hand. Besides, the police dislike such people so much that they consider them unworthy of the protection of the law. By lying, the police enforce these folkways of their own, while preserving the shell of due process of law...

…These charges – disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and felonious assault, or all three – together with a story to establish them, constitute the system for covering street abuses.

If you can ever get your hands on the book, or care to, the quotes appear on pages 141 through 143. Nothing I appreciate like someone who will just tell it like it is. Lots of people dislike the police to varying degrees, but precious few will tell it like it is, and it is a rare minority who can do so with such eloquence and measured rationality.

That was in 1969. Here we are today. Same shit, except we've got YouTube. This pig, as all learn to do if they didn't know already, counted on the police lie. It inexplicably failed him. He doesn't seem to have made any effort to cover anything. Why? Because he assumed (almost always correctly) that he didn't need to. Everyone else would do it for him, the rest of the pigs down at the slophouse would do it for him, with him, as that's part of the pig life, and the court almost always takes a pig's word over almost anyone.

This story is a pretty surprising example of someone breaking with that tradition. People very rarely cross that blue line. I'm not sure what persuaded this officer to do so. I wouldn't look at it as any kind of harbinger, but it's nice for now. Hopefully this pig will get fucked. Since the people on whom he went off are white, I believe it is much more likely. I also bet that pig who turned him in is going to catch hell from the rest of the force. They do not take kindly to "betrayal."