Articles like this need to name the people who called the cops, and the cops in the video.
Also, I never dealt with this particular agency, but, from my time living there, the bureaucracy and bureaucrats you deal with are worse than any other place I’ve been, including Japan, which is really saying something. I never appreciated how polite, reasonable, and professional the DMV employees here in Oregon are until I lived in NY.
Folks there seem to like it that way, too. I had always assumed conservative stereotypes about liberals wanting abusive, inefficient, unaccountable bureaucrats preying on the people were just hallucinations like so much of the rest of the things they believe, but NY democrats, on the whole, strike me as actually being like that.
“Oh. You’re right there aren’t any other seats ma’am. EXCUSE ME. Can someone please swap with this lady. She’s got an infant and could use a seat. I’ll see if I can find a few folding chairs” …obviously too much brain power to come up with that solution instead.
I would love to say this is shocking, outrageous, unheard of, etc, but we all know it is commonplace. Gotta keep the “them” in their place, right? Can’t have them thinking they can just exercise their rights like a white person, right? No, not shocking, but it is infuriating. And the fact that there will be no consequences for this behavior (other than destroying another black family) is even more infuriating.
Sit/lie ordinances have criminalized being homeless in public. The advocates always point to how they won’t be applied to people who aren’t homeless so no worries. Selectively enforced laws are the antithesis of rule of law.
No shit if she were white she’d have been screaming that she’d sue because they didn’t get her a chair! But really, some one could have been a decent human… just one human being halfway decent would have helped. Nope… of course not.
It sounds like the security were being total assholes to the woman, reportedly harassing and mocking her before the cops showed up. And apparently the cops showed up because someone called about “harassment” taking place. (Which only makes sense if the cops were called on, rather than by, the security guards.)
As someone with a shit leg, I am not above sitting on the floor vs standing for long periods. Some times even laying. What, exactly, is the supposed logic in not allowing someone to do this?
If I lived in NYC I’d be on that floor in a damn minute, with my child in arms. There needs to be a protest there. A sit-in with the emphasis on the actual sitting-in.
We already know the cops are animals in these situations. There needs to be more recognition that calling the cops on someone in these kinds of situations needs to have consequences as well.
At this point, it seems that the crowed would have been justified to bodily force the cops out of the building. The pigs were endangering everyone, not the least of which is a mother and her child.
In the “wild west” they had ways of dealing with bad law enforcement. Tar and feathering comes to mind. Running them out of town on a rail is another.
Seems a lot more civilized than letting the cops beat you and then never get punished.
This video made me so hopeless and afraid. The police have lost all sense of decency and humanity. The duty of care owed to that child, if not that mother, was completely cast aside in favor of brutalism. I genuinely wondered if the child would survive. That not one of those officers of the law could see the situation spiraling out of control and STOP themselves, stop their coworkers? I genuinely think we would be better off without police if this is the best they can do. I no longer think the police can be reformed.
