Activists respond […] on Twitter
I don’t think I would call them activists. The regulars at the local coffee shop love to talk about stuff like this. Are they activists too?
I sometimes wonder if the goal isn’t to water down the word activist and the concept of activism. Most tweets are never read. You might as well be marching in your backyard.
I am all for a police officer having to enter a situation and perhaps mentally prepare them-self for the worst possible outcome; however, in this instance He draws his weapon on a bunch of teenagers who let’s be honest if they had weapons to begin with would have already drawn them. He then proceeds to man handle a teenage girl in a bikini. IF she was concealing a dangerous weapon I cannot rightly imagine where she had it (don’t even go there)!
I also find it amazing that my understanding of being an authority figure is to DE-escalate a situation. If those kids are screaming, you don’t scream louder, you talk more softly and with more conviction. You bring the energy down, not elevate it. If someone becomes confrontational and their is a point of no return - then I am all for an officer doing their job which at that point becomes “defuse at all costs”. But it seems officers like this renegade jump straight to that point.
The more disturbing part is what one tweet from above points out…no other officer stops this fool. Why are they not defusing the situation with the kids AND the other officer.
Guns, police brutality, violence against black people, privileged fat white people standing around pretending nothing’s happening. Is there a more perfect picture of what America has become?
Your country has become a horror story.
Signed,
The rest of the world.
- Shaun King is launching a project to end police brutality.
- Ava DuVernay received an academy award nomination for Selma.
- Charles Clymer covers social justice issues for the Huff Po.
- Brittany Packnett is the Executive Director of Teach for America in
St. Louis and helped organize protests in Ferguson. - Preston Mitchum is an Analyst at the Center for American Progress on the
FIRE Initiative, which works to eliminate the social, economic,
and health disparities faced by LGBT people of color. - Hasan Minhaj is a member of The Daily Show, stage for some of the most
pive voices of the last decade+.
Miss Packnett is the only name I recognized in the story. Cynical me thought this was another example of twitter activism with no offline activity. Thanks for the information.
I don’t think it’s true that no other officer stops him - when he draws his gun (at which point my heart was in my mouth) two other officers appear instantly and one puts his hand on his arm. Admittedly, up to that point what he was doing didn’t warrant intervention, and they may just have been going to back him up. But it looked to me like their attitude was “uh-uh Eric, maybe don’t do that”.
If there were justice, the other cops would have drawn on him as he was, at that point, the only person threatening grievous bodily harm to another person.
“PUT THE F-IN GUN DOWN OR I’ll SHOOT!”
“I SAID OFFICER NUMBNUTS PUT THE F-ING GUN DOWN NOW!”
But that didn’t happen eh?.. A gentle hand on the arm… Maybe you should calm down and rethink your decision… Too bad nobody else gets that courtesy.
It makes me sad that your scenario is utterly inconceivable
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