Originally published at: A Colorado cop was arrested on felony charges after new video shows him violently abusing a man | Boing Boing
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I can only think that this situation would have gone better if Officer Thugs-a-lot had both hands available instead of attempting to subdue with one hand holding his fucking gun
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Holy shit this was hard to watch.
I applaud the Department for being quick to take action, and release the footage. I also applaud Cheif Wilson’s choice of language. No “we’re investigating” bullshit, just straight up “We’re disgusted”.
The officers involved, especially the male, are fucking disgusting. This is sub-human behavior and has no place in society, especially so at the level of civil servitude.
This is why several months of training isn’t enough. Police Officers should be required to hold Bachelor’s Degrees in Law and Civil Rights.
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FTFY, Chief Wilson.
Aurora is by far Colorado’s most ethnically diverse community, and the police seem to kick it up a notch for them, while refusing to investigate crimes that don’t make them look good for solving.
Their last mayoral election gave hope. Former R Congressman Mike Coffman landed in a runoff with Omar Montgomery, head of the Aurora NAACP. It came down to a handful of votes, but of course Coffman won… This was the only time I have ever wished I could live there so I could vote against Coffman. Imagine if Montgomery had won…
To his credit, Coffman had built significant support among the African communities, but he’s done little to rein in a department known for killing innocents of all colors and for drunk officers on duty, including this case.
On the other side of Denver, we had this recently:
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This is the real story here. I’m very eager to see how enforcement of these measures holds up. I’m nowhere near confident in a sea change in law enforcement, but revoking QA and making them directly responsible for the actions of their peers could have some serious ramifications. Anyone who says that the BLM protests didn’t accomplish anything can take a long walk off a short pier.
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If only every officer had their own guiding conscience, Tinker Galoot. That would be awesome.
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“We don’t train this.”
Interesting how this is a universal police department response when officers are caught out doing stuff like this. I guess they need to say that because a) you’d think departments must be training the officers to do this, given how frequent such occurrences are, and b) police do give all sorts of counter-productive and inhumane training, so they have to be clear something like this isn’t part of it.
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police chief uses awful flowery words. almost like she’s willing to open up the city’s purse in an attempt to make the victim feel better. right. let’s hear the talk after the lawsuit has been served.
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Roger that! HFS. If anyone had any doubts about the force of Gunny McGunface’s blows, the size of those welts was just…
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I’m surprised that Colorado has a police accountability law like this. Not surprised because “Colorado,” but surprised because it happened anywhere. Now I guess we see if the law actually has teeth.
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Yeah, they’re doing some cool stuff around the state. Did you see where, I wanna say Denver, maybe? They added a separate unit to address medical and mental health emergencies and routed police calls to that team when appropriate. Big success.
Just found it, yep, Denver:
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New Mexico also has one.
Colorado has already had to update the law to close a loophole that required a city to certify that a cop was at fault to open up doors to lawsuits. One particularly asshole-festooned community, Greenwood Village, had come out to say they would never find one of their “finest” at fault, and some other backwards places echoed them.
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What an obvious loophole, wow. How did the drafters of that legislation not see that coming?
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This all happened in the past year as a direct result of the protests against police violence (as @ClutchLinkey and @MarcoE’s links indicate). Again, it’s no panacea, but it’s a massive move in the right direction.
Iirc, the original intent was to take that discretion away from the police, where bad deeds often get buried in internal affairs and special commission fuckery. But yeah, anything that treats cops as anything other than more responsible than the average citizen and allows cronyist back-outs is a problem.
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Eh, I’m tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially since they fixed it.
I help draft policy for a federal program and it’s fucking hard, I’ll tell you. You have to go in realizing that some people will abuse anything, but you also can’t write it in such a restrictive way that it deals with any and every possible form of malfeasance. 
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What a bunch of fucking animals. Sticking a gun against the head of an unarmed man who was clearly, and with good reason, terrified they were going to kill him.
And when the reinforcements arrive one ask the animal “are you OK?” as if he was the one in danger.
This should make anyone with even an ounce of decency very angry.
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“This was criminal.”
While I applaud the unflinching choice of words, if they really believe this, why is the cop on leave instead of in jail?
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And even harder to listen to. I had to shut it off when the bleeding victim started crying like a little boy.
Brutal McThumbface has a felony record and still was hired as a cop. He needs to experience the inside of a cell for a long time.
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Actually, I think I wasn’t clear in my post about the cause and effect, so thank you for drawing that line! Direct action works. Let’s all keep fighting the good fight in whatever capacities we have!
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