By Lea Barrios
TAMPA / PHILADELPHIA – Videos were taken of police violently apprehending women during peaceful protests—the senior officer filmed hitting a woman with a baton and pinning her to the ground has been suspended and charged with assaulting a protester.
T. Greg Doucette tweeted the video taken in Philadelphia that shows a crowd of police partially surrounding protesters and slowly pushing them back.
Officer Joseph Bologna charges at a woman pushing her and the people behind her back.
There is a man being grabbed by an officer—but several protesters are holding him, including one protester holding the man and trying to separate him from the officer.
Bologna pulled that man’s arm and a woman put her hand on the officer’s hand that was grabbing the man.
2️⃣9️⃣4️⃣ Philadelphia, PA: how many Philly cops does it take to beat one woman? I count two, after the pudgy bastard in white starts beating people with his baton
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 5, 2020
Bologna charged at that woman with his baton, hitting her and pinning her to the ground. Another officer joined him and held her down by putting his knee on her back.
The several officers surrounded them; one swung his baton at a protester for being near the arrest.
Similarly, in Tampa, FL, several officers pinned a woman to the ground to arrest her.
In the video she is already on the ground being held down by three police officers. Four officers make a perimeter around them, one with his pepper spray in a ready position.
Bystanders yell at the officers to stop and get off of her. Before the video ends an officer sprays in the direction of the person filming the arrest.
Patrick Skinner, a police officer in Georgia, wrote for The Washington Post about his experience as a CIA agent in the war after 9/11 and how that affected his practices as a police officer:
“We focused on who and what we were fighting against instead of who and what we were fighting for, and in the shade of that difference, rot grew,” he said.
News about 2️⃣9️⃣4️⃣ above out of Philadelphia
When your senior leadership is violating the Constitution this flagrantly, it's a reminder that the cultural rot in policing runs *deep*
Lawlessness https://t.co/i4zuigvK3l https://t.co/BWB3QxuYZl
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 5, 2020
He contends that the reason why police brutality and excessive force are such a prevalent problem in the U.S. is that law enforcement officers are trained to fight the people they have sworn to protect.
He states that police officers are trained for “force protection,” much like those who are about to go to war, explaining, “The training revolves around the idea not just that anyone could harm me, but that they will.”
Skinner criticized Trump’s recent order to militarize police because “to do so is to pour gasoline on a burning house and give the firefighters guns to fight the fire.”
I said I was going to speak out. I prefer a twitter feed of mean cats & sweet dogs but we need to change what it means to be ‘police’ in America. So I spoke out. Here is something personal I wrote. I appreciate the @washingtonpost giving me this chance https://t.co/dZLQ7Wl5Qn
— Patrick Skinner (@SkinnerPm) June 3, 2020
Skinner said his approach is to treat everyone he helps like his neighbor and asks himself how he would handle the situation if he didn’t have his badge or uniform—he said he has found great success in treating the people he serves with respect and understanding.
For example, if he is called somewhere because they called 911 he would call that person on his phone to ask for other details. Doing this helped him enter situations better because he knows what is happening or what name they like to be called—like, for example, an autistic man who was breaking things in his home.
He said that most of the time the situation is less serious than it was described on the call, although it can sometimes be more serious.
“I have found that the closer I get to my neighbors, the safer we all are. Once we change to that mindset, we can change police training to match. A funny thing happened on the way to becoming a better rookie cop by being a better neighbor: I became a better person.”
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The role of the police is confusing if you listen to what they (our political institutions that created and fund them and “reform” them) say about themselves. Protect and serve. Maybe what we don’t understand is who they protect and serve. Could it be to protect and serve Private Property (not necessarily small property owners) of the ruling elite and their institutions of courts, laws and social order that maintain their power? Seen in that light, the behavior of the police is what we should expect. It’s also why reform will, of necessity, be ineffective. All the problems we decry about the police are created and tolerated by most of us to the extent we ally ourselves with that ruling elite hoping that what is good for them will trickle down to us; or, that we will somehow share in their good fortune which is only possible because the dreaded forces of chaos (labor unions, minorities, indigenous people, environmentalists, muckraking journalists, unemployed, unemployable, people of conscience) are kept at bay by the shield of the thin blue line.
Dave, the time has come to stop the oppression. All of those disenfranchised people you enumerate must resist the pessimism of the past and the rhetoric of the phony President and his cadre of parroting clowns. We cannot continue to allow the most dangerous gang in America to stifle the cultural and intellectual energy that makes this country truly great and not the cartoon dictatorship that Trump and his wrecking crew have tried to make it. Let’s take this country back from the alien influence of Putin and his lapdog Trump. The defunding/dismantling of the police is an essential step if we are ever to fulfill the promise of “Liberty and Justice for all.”