By Lina Chappelle
It’s one thing to get a ticket for jaywalking,
but it’s another to get arrested for sitting at a bus stop.
The latest case of questionable
police behavior: the arrest of 25-year-old Abie Kyle Ikhinmwin, a University of
Texas at San Antonio student, who was confronted and accused of committing a
traffic vio lation while at a bus stop near a shopping center. The criminal
justice student questioned the officer in return and was told she was gong to
jail before being dragged by her hair into the back of a police car. Luckily
the confrontation was all on film.
“I’ve never been so dehumanized
in my life,” Ikhimwin said.
Police-on-civilian violence
goes well beyond just minor and unjustified arrests.
There was the recent murder of
18-year-old Keith Vidal, who suffered from schizophrenia. When cops arrived
after his family called in seek help to subdue the teen, they shot and killed
him. One cop is reported to have said “we don’t have time for this” before
shooting the boy.
There was the death of Florida
A&M football player, Jonathan Ferrell. After having a car accident, Ferrell
went to seek help at a nearby home. The woman there, mistaking his need for
help as a burglary attempt, called the cops. When they arrived, Ferrell ran to
them for help and in exchange got shot ten times. A second grand jury has
indicted the officer that killed Ferrell and if found guilty of voluntary
manslaughter he could face up to eleven years in prison.
Don’t forget about 70-year-old
veteran Bobby Canipe, who police shot when he was just reaching for his cane.
Or the brutal mistreatment of Charda Gregory, whose hair was cut off while she
was handcuffed. A list, provided by the CATO Institute’s Police Misconduct,
goes on and on, but where does it end?
A very large part of the
problem is that there are no national standards for police conduct and the
result, as Tony Dokoupil with NBC News explained, is “wildly inconsistent
results” spewed by the court systems. Of the 17,000 police precincts in our
nation, every single one has different procedures. After much research,
Dokoupil found that the rate of police shootings is steadily increasing through
cities in America.
The report reads:
“Charlotte police killed five
people last year, the most in a decade—but less, City Manager Ron Carlee told
the Charlotte Observer, than were killed by police in Washington (49), Memphis
(42), Fort Worth (32), or Austin (17), all of which have seen their own numbers
creep upward.
Boston police (along with their
counterparts at the state level) have fired more bullets in each of the last
five years, hitting at least 23 people last year, 11 of them fatally.
Philadelphia police shot 52 people in 2012, prompting the commissioner to ask
the U.S. Justice Department for a special review. Dallas, Miami, Baltimore,
Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City: all have been rocked
by use of force scandals in recent years.”
And while some of the cases
mentioned above get properly tried, many cases that involve police misconduct
are not even addressed.
A study done by William
Terrill, criminal justice professor at Michigan State University, found that of
600 police departments examined, there was not one standard policy for handling
civilian resistance. Basically, police departments are making up procedures as
they go, but that leaves room for major injustices.
“Excess is in the eyes of the
beholder,” Terrill wrote. “To one officer ‘objectively reasonable’ means that
if you don’t give me your license, I get to use soft hands.”
“And in another town,” he
added, “the same resistance means I can pull you through the car window, I can
tase you.”
