Houston Police Brutality Goes Unpunished

Beware the gang uniforms with the badges

Sebastian Prevot watched helplessly as three police officers advanced on his wife. Prevot was handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cop car. Half of his left ear dangled where it had been torn from his head. The Houston Police Department doesn't deny that its officers gave Prevot these injuries during a late-night arrest in January 2012. The only dispute is whether he earned them.

Prevot had been returning home from a night out with a friend. He was two miles from his house when he stopped just past the white line at a four-way stop sign. Two officers in a patrol car tried to pull him over, but he kept driving. Prevot says he didn't want to pull over and continued home—"going the speed limit, stopping at every stop sign"—because he knew he was about to be detained and have his car impounded.

"My kids had to go to school in the morning," he told me. "My wife had to go to work."