Do you think the cops would have behaved differently if they were towing unregistered cars belonging to a white family of similar economic status (yard filled with misc junk, el camino out front), when one of the owners drives up in a scrapper pickup truck (so described because it’s got a ton of scrap in the back) and starts arguing with them about the cars they’re towing?
I’ve had an unregistered car on the street, it doesn’t get towed immediately, it sits there and accumulates a couple of tickets before they finally remove it.
He was legally filming the event (well, I don’t know about bogus recording statutes in Omaha that might require two party consent or some garbage like that) but he wasn’t following the instructions of the police. Twice he was removed from the street and left alone, and twice he came back onto the street. Cops aren’t going to respond favorably to encroachment, and there’s a difference between it being legal to film something and having some sort of constitutional right to film.
“Hey, I’ve got a crappy cellphone camera, I can’t see the action, so I’m going to ignore your instructions to stay back on the sidewalk and instead get closer to you cops who are having trouble restraining my brother so I can film you. And by the way, I’m going to exercise my first amendment right to shout out my opinion at the top of my lungs that THAT IS ABUSE, THAT IS ABUSE, etc”
That’s not the same thing as “he was legally filming the event”
Also, he only decided to run back all the way to his home after he was being chased by a cop. If he wanted to be safe in his home, he could have done so either of the first two times the police officer escorted / chased him away from the scene. The third time, he wasn’t ‘running for the safety of his house’ because he was eluding the police. There is a difference in the two acts.
Why are those cops any more of a threat to the black men here than their possibly white neighbors up the street who also may have had unregistered cars?
There is nothing here that screams out that this was a racially motivated event, aside from the color of the skin of the people involved which seems by all accounts secondary to the behaviors of the people involved.
Regarding your pithy “the only threat to a cop” line, I get that you’re trying to be witty, but you’re so cosmically wrong here and it fails at every level. Let’s go check out the FBI’s crime stats on law enforcement offices killed and assaulted
For example, in 2012, roughly 1 in 10 officers were assaulted while performing their duties - over 50,000 incidents. About 1/3 of those sustained injuries during the assault.
Over 60% of assaults to officers occurred when they were the only officer on hand. Like, for example, when all the other officers ran after the video recording brother and left the other officer along with the brother on the ground.
Here’s a fun one for you, of the officers killed that same year, nearly 60% were killed by white assailants, while only about 30% were killed by black assailants.
Strangely, despite your assertion that affluent white lawyers represent the biggest threat to a officer safety, it doesn’t seem to register as a statistically significant criteria.
So, anyway, what are you trying to say? Cops are a threat to people who don’t follow their instructions, why do you feel race is an issue in this case? Everything everyone’s said about how terrible the cops are is fine, because they prove it over and over, but it seems like you’re piling on this case out of habit which is lazy and makes it harder to be genuinely outraged when cops do step out of line.
