Cause the boyz n tha hood are always hard
by digby
A police department in Indiana has launched an internal investigation after a firefighter said he was thrown to the ground and threatened with a Taser for waving at several officers, who thought he was flipping them off.
Evansville firefighter George Madison Jr. told the Evansville Courier & Press that he filed a formal complaint over the incident that happened on Tuesday. Madison, who also serves as a youth pastor at at Memorial Baptist Church, said that he was riding his bicycle on South Weinbach Avenue when he waved at several officers in a patrol car.
The next thing he knew, the officers had pulled him over.
“The officer jumped out and says, ‘What are you doing throwing your hands up at us?’” Madison recalled. “He is talking to me as he is coming toward me. I tried to explain, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
Madison said that he knew Evansville Police Chief Billy Bolin from community events, so he took out his cellphone to call him for help calming the situation. But the officer told him to put the phone down. And when he hesitated, the Taser came out.
“It was literally maybe inches from my face,” the father of four said. “I immediately threw my hands in the air. What he asked me to do I was more than willing to do. I said ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ The next thing I know I’m laying down the ground and they cuffed me.”
“I remember looking down the barrel of a Taser, because [the officer] was gritting his teeth and saying, ‘Don’t make me pull this trigger.’”
After the officers asked him where he worked, their attitudes changed, Madison said.
You know who else gets upset when someone “throw their hands” and looks at them in a certain way? Street gangs. That’s right, Crips and Bloods in their various permutations.
Such “disrespect” can cost you your life on the mean streets of many inner cities. But the police are supposed to be different. Nowadays, a whole lot of them have adopted this gangster ethos of demanding instant “respect” and total compliance. They just use a taser to do it instead of a gun. Homicide requires a whole lot more paperwork.
This isn’t confined to police officers either. My husband was in a TSA security line at LAX earlier this week and got into a conversation with a women who told him she’d been harassed at a Canadian airport recently. He said to her that she should always comply with the TSA because they have a lot of power over individual citizens and it makes no sense to fight it. He was yanked out of the line by TSA agents and taken to a secure corner where they quizzed him about what he meant by saying that TSA has “power” over people. They went through every item in his carry on bags and he almost missed his plane. He tried to explain that he was only telling the woman that she should comply with their orders, but they were apparently upset at being characterized as people who might abuse their power. So they abused their power and harassed a citizen for saying something completely obvious.
This is creeping authoritarianism. We’ve got millions of people in America wearing uniforms and carrying some kind of government authority and we’re all going to have to learn that they will not be disrespected, even if they are delusional idiots. No, it’s not the end of the world and we’re not being rounded up and sent to the gulag. But it’s not exactly freedom and liberty either.
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