Justified use of force

Misan Mayıs 21, 2022

Brother Dwight emails to point out this example of how there's one set of rules for us, and a different one for those in Police uniform:

Two Buffalo police officers who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground during a protest in 2020 have been cleared by an arbitrator, who said the use of force was “absolutely legitimate” because the man, who was hospitalized with a head injury, was “not an innocent bystander.”

Non-paywalled article here.

So it's an example of a justified use of force, at least for the police. My reply to him was overly snarky, that if it had been at a Black Lives Matter protest the city would have burned to the ground. I should have read the article first. It was at a BLM protest, and the city didn't burn.

Now a few points:

1. This was a Police Department administrative hearing. The cops got off in the same way that cops who shoot homeowner's dogs, or do no-knock raids on the wrong house, or throw flash-bang grenades into baby cribs get off. The Blue Wall of Silence, and all that.

2. The man is going to sue the police department, and the city will almost certainly settle out of court. The taxpayers will lose but the cops will be fine.

3. If you or I roughed up a 75 year old man, we'd be looking at multiple felony charges. Know your place, peasant.

4. I'd be a lot more supportive of the police if they cleaned up the bad cops. Everyone knows who those are, but the Blue Wall of Silence tars the good cops with the bad. This is probably the biggest tragedy of the whole situation.

5. The Queen Of The World disagrees with me on this, and thinks that the cops are being railroaded by a biased media. She thinks the guy was screaming into their faces and they pushed him back rather than cuffing him, and he tripped when he fell back. I'm less certain here, and would be more sympathetic to them if there were not a different set of rules for us (#3 above) and covering for bad cops (#4 above).

Oh, and you do read Dwight every day, don't you? He's your go-to guy for obituaries and which coach just got fired.

UPDATE 12 April 2022 19:37: Dwight is going to post Gilbert Gottfried's obit tomorrow.