Thursday, November 10, 2011

LRPD Excessive force: not certain, but believable

Many blogs have written about this incident so I thought I'd show this video and discuss my thoughts.

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For anyone who hasn't heard, the above video is of an incident that happened outside the restaurant Ferneau. Having watched the video, the face punching is the one part that to me seems absolutely uncalled for. The rest of the video is hard to see, but I fail to see how an officer is justified in holding an unarmed suspect's neck and punching him in the face multiple times. I have friends who have been or are in law enforcement and this runs counter to all the training and handling of suspects that they have told me about.

I will also add to that a personal experience I had on Cinco de Mayo at El Porton in LR several years ago where I witnessed excessive behavior by an officer working security. The officer approached a man sitting at a table near ours and asked why the man was looking at him "funny". Having been at the front door the officer walked all the way into the bar area to ask that. The man denied looking at the officer any sort of "funny" way and it escalated into the officer asking the man to leave and then slamming the man on the table, knocking it over, and spraying mace. The mace then basically cleared the entire area of the restaurant as everyone started coughing and dealing with burning sensations. So the idea of a Little Rock police officer acting excessively isn't too crazy to me.

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