Cop Punches Woman In Face – This Week’s Trends In Police Brutality

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The longstanding conventional wisdom that is embedded into the head of every red-blooded American boy from very early on is that you “never hit a woman.”  That is an edict that is traditionally espoused, without qualifiers, around the age where a clear separation in strength levels between the sexes begins to manifest itself, somewhere in the thick of the grammar school years, presumably so that there is no confusing the point by the time puberty and the awkward, oily, early awakening of sexual desires are reached.

A thing that I find as I hurdle achily toward middle age is that many of the fundamental academic lessons of my youth have receded into the glowing sediment of two decade’s worth of psychedelics and crippler-weed resin that has settled upon my brainpan.  For example, I know that there is a way to take a given number and extrapolate what percentage that number is of another larger and more intimidating number, but for the porn-loving life of me, I can never figure out what that number is, or for that matter, how much to pay somebody to figure it out for me.

Now just imagine what it would be like to be a cop.  Imagine all the information you have to have committed to memory in this day and age just to do your job without disgracing yourself, your precinct, and your family on video. You might lose sight of some of the basics your own damn self.

This week, just such a lapse of memory was captured for posterity in the gentle little town called Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a police officer of that fine town brought down a member of the citizenry in attendance at the Puerto Rican Day Parade with a brotherly roundhouse punch in the face, deftly executed from well outside the unsuspecting victim’s range of vision.  A look-see if you haven’t had the pleasure:

Damn.

Now let’s compare that one to another clip from a few weeks ago, this one from Lincoln, Rhode Island:

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  The blow delivered in the first example is a punch from behind, while the example from the second clip is a kick from the side.  In the first example, the victim of the blow is walking away from the police, and in the second, the victim is cuffed and seated on the curb.  Neither victim, it would appear, seems to have assumed a position that could be defined as physically imposing or threatening by either of the arresting officers.  Both cops are well in excess of 200 pounds, and both women go to the ground as a result of their respective  blows.  But it is the kicking victim that drops like a sack of wet flour as the kick catches her precisely on the jaw hinge.

Now, it is a standard response of police departments embroiled in just such a controversy to decry the lack of context presented in this type of clip, immediately before establishing for the public a palpable context that will allow for the punishment of the officer without the embarrassment of the entire force.

I say there is enough context without the requisite PR blitz.  Firstly, both blows are roundhouses: one kick and one punch.  A roundhouse is a blow of anger, of losing your shit, particularly for somebody who has some training in hand-to-hand-combat.  With a jab, you maintain your center of gravity.  With a wild roundhouse, you’re leaning into trouble.  Unless you’re kicking or punching a restrained or unsuspecting female in the head.

The Lincoln kick, according to the officer in question, was the result of the handcuffed woman kicking the officer in the shin as he wrote up a citation.  If you play the clip back, you can see this happening, as well as the efficiency with which the officer dispatches his foot into the side of her head and then returns to his paperwork.  It is a seamless, apparently dispassionate act on the part of the officer and, for that matter, the other officers on the scene, who don’t bat so much as an eye as the girl tips over on her side.  The lack of reaction by the other personnel creates all the context you need.  Nothing to see here.  Just another broad getting her head kicked in.

The scene of the Philadelphia assault is much more chaotic than the clip from Lincoln, and it is the officers pursuit of the woman that gets him into trouble.  It has been revealed that the officer had been sprayed in the face with some silly string, and that this was the precursor to the bloodying of the victim.  Very difficult to convince people that you were fending off a potentially dangerous situation when you are chasing your attacker across a busy thoroughfare   Appropriately, the cop in this clip has been suspended, pending his likely shitcanning in the coming weeks.

It’s hard to get inside the cop head in these situations.  I can imagine that shift work at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, or frankly, any kind of fucking parade must require patience and wisdom on the order of Solomon.  And this is a disposition that not all of us have.  What we do all have, however, are cameras.  With decent resolution.  And if a cop forgets everything else that he/she ever learned in early life, it is of the utmost importance that he/she remembers that.

One Comment

1. 

   Police Chief David C

   October 6, 2012 at 12:03 pm

   Police use of excessive force, especially deadly force, hurts everyone – MOSTLY the police — in terms of lost cooperation, support and trust – which, in turn, diminishes their effectiveness.

   Reply