NYPD Slams Pregnant Woman to the Ground for Intervening in Arrest of Teen, Father Also Booked
Another day, another video of police brutality. This time a video caught by a bystander and posted on Facebook shows officers from the New York Police Department (NYPD) shoving a pregnant Brooklyn woman to the ground who was trying to intervene in the arrest of her 17-year-old son. The cops also pushed another woman and arrested the teen's dad for arguing about the arrest as well, according to the New York Post. The teen's alleged crime? Carrying a knife in New York City.
Watch the video below:
No amount of diversity training, sensitivity training, diversification or community relations-building can eliminate behavior like this by law enforcement. The laws need to change. Not just the laws that protect bad cops but the petty laws (like banning knives over a certain length*) that create the opportunity for such interactions in the first place.
*Years ago I had a beautiful, lightly stained, hunting knife I found at World Trade Center confiscated from me by a cop in Times Square who noticed it in my pocket.and said it was too long. He said I could throw it out or go to the station with him. I tried to throw it into the trash in a way that I could recover it later but the cop clued in to it and came to watch me junk it. Later on a friend told me that the reason the cops wanted me to throw the knife out is because they couldn't do it themselves and that the threat of taking me to the station was probably a bluff. A couple of months later I got big into Ron Paul.