I couldn’t see accurately enough what exactly was going on in the first few seconds of the video, but to clarify: I was not in any way suggesting that Acker was the instigator of the situation. LEOs are supposed to be better trained than the average person when it comes to avoiding and diffusing tense situations, so the claim that his violence towards her was in reaction to being kicked in the balls was a dead-end to me no matter what.
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Why don’t you sit down in a chair, have someone stand to the left of you, then try to kick them in the groin with your right foot. While drunk. You’d be lucky to even make contact, let alone inflict any actually damage.
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So you can play the IF game but people replying to you cannot? That doesn’t seem right.
That is exactly what the training is for, something to fall back on besides the base animal reaction. Cops cannot afford to fly into rages of blind fury. That is unacceptable for someone in their position. If they are the kind of person who cannot help such a reaction, then they have no business being a police officer, period. I think from your reply to a different commenter that you quoted above that you agree with this, so I’m really not sure what the issue is.
So we agree that this is unacceptable behavior for a trained professional?
I’d also argue that it is unacceptable behavior for anyone. Throwing a handcuffed person on the floor so hard you knock their teeth out when they have no way to break their fall is a dick move and unacceptable no matter who you are. I’d argue that if you fly into a rage of fury when hurt, that there are people you can talk to about that and work through it so that you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else in such a scenario.
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You know, I’ve taken a punch from someone far more physically threatening than a 100lb woman (though still a lot smaller than me) and decided not to escalate it, and talked him down, after he was shocked that I didn’t go down and didn’t come right back at him. I would like to think that anyone who we give sanction to use violence at their own discretion to enforce laws would have at least as much self-control in a situation that suddenly turned violent as a random civilian with no relevant training, especially if, as is clearly the case here, he were the one who initially made the situation violent.
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Yea. Based upon the clip, it seems like the cop has real anger issues.
He should look into therapy… and a new job.
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This being Colorado Springs, most of the residents will happily pay the fine and support the police to do more of the same.
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That is very depressing. 
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This cop surely feels that it is prudent to give wide force to anyone who has the power to seriously threaten his freedom and life. Especially bad girls with nothing to lose and ball kicking legs. See the symmetry? What’s useful, prudent even, for oneself can be disastrous to society.
Maybe because you’re a psychopath. Not that I’m in anyway supporting the police when they do wrong, but I do acknowledge at least that they are human beings and worth being judged on their actions, rather than judged harshly because they are cops. I want to live in an America where we value human life, that means cops too. Alas, that isn’t the America we live in at the moment.
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And the hilarious part of that analogy is that we euthanize animals that react violently and cannot be trained to do otherwise. A cop’s dog is held to a higher standard than a cop, and is more trustworthy.
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I believe it was this sentiment that started the Black Panthers. If cops don’t get a handle on themselves, people will consider alternative ways of dealing with disputes.
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Disagree…this is Colorado Springs home of Doug Bruce and the TABOR amendment. The only thing its residents like more than guns, God, and the fuckin’ A military is not paying taxes. The interstate running thru town was renamed “Ronald Reagan Highway” fer crisakes.
They won’t even pay for basic city services like street lights, garbage pickup or pothole repairs. It finally took the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest fires destroying a bunch of big houses a few years ago to grudgingly pass a ballot initiative to raise taxes to increase funding for police and firefighters.
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Am I the only person that saw attempted murder in that video? Hitting a cement floor that hard the wrong way, like straight on your nose, can be fatal. Settlement? Bullshit. That cop belongs in jail.
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It’s a serious issue of culture gone awry combined with “scope creep”.
I too tired and angry to get deep --here’s the nutshell version: Give a man a hammer to fight nails, reinforce the notion that any situation can become a “hammer, meet nail” scenario and THEN give the man bigger and badder hammers because, so many nails out there and, AND --provide the hammer swingers license to hit whatever they think needs hitting?
I mean, what could go wrong?
Are bad (whatever that means) cops in the minority? Yeah. But does that matter anymore?
Here’s a thought: change the oft repeated mantra “to protect and serve” to “first, do no harm.”
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When my son was four, he had to have blood taken over several weeks, which he was not happy about. At about the third week, he kicked the needle-wielding blood technician in the nuts mid-jab. The man threw my child down, slammed his head on the floor and knocked his teeth out. There was a bit of a kerfuffle about it, but in the end the guy kept his job.
Obviously, the second half of this story is not true; but the first half is. What really happened is that the hospital worker visibly suppressed his fury while I apologized madly. It never occurred to me that he was being particularly heroic in not harming the boy. I doubt he received special training, and I don’t think cops should require special training either to suppress the urge to destroy a snippy teenager for causing them pain. Better to screen the abnormally violent ones out at the start. If only they would do that.
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The difference is that you would have been arrested and charged with a serious crime, whereas police officers are shielded from personal responsibility for their actions.
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Apparently you employ the most sadistic boneheads to terrorize your own population, always waging wars agains terrorism abroad.
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They have been shielded from prosecution and departmental discipline. But not the other 99.9% of the population…
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Pity the cop doesn’t foot the bill instead of the taxpayer.
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I really don’t get the whole American “plea bargain” thing. Either they did something and should be tried on that basis or they didn’t in which case you let them go, none of this “we’ll let this one thing go if you admit to doing this other thing you may not have done but we want to say you did for our own reasons” malarkey.
It’s almost as if the cops were purposefully throwing out more serious charges with only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence in an attempt to intimidate because they knew the system would inherently support them… But that doesn’t seem like a fair and truthful process of justice at all!
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