Our very, very sick police culture
by digby
A suburban Detroit police officer admitted he asked a mentally ill black man to sing and dance and video recorded the incident.
Videos and and photos with degrading portrayals of black men were submitted earlier this month to the blog, Motor City Muckraker, purportedly from officers who disseminated them to friends and colleagues in the upper class, majority-white Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe Park. One video portrayed a voice alleged to be an officer asking black men to do humiliating tasks, including “dance like a chimp.” In another incident, an officer allegedly texted a photo of a black man in the back of his trailer with the text, “Gotta love the coloreds.” The journalist, Steve Neavling, told the Huffington Post that he has more than a dozen videos shot by officers, but has not shared most of them because of their “humiliating nature.”
Friendly reminder: this is 2013, not 1813.
I just can’t …
If this were just an isolated incident we could chalk it up to bad apples. But it’s not. We have a big problem with our police culture in this country. And it’s getting worse.
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