cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15408610
Texas mom says police held her face in pile of fire ants, covering head and neck with hundreds of bite marks
"Didn’t believe the bodycam video!”
Acab
Cruel and unusual? Extrajudicial? Just another day in The Greatest Nation on God’s Green Earth.
ACAB
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A woman accused police officers in Santa Fe, Texas, of holding her face down in a pile of fire ants, leaving bite marks all over her head and chest.
The suit said a second officer arrived at the scene, slammed Rogers to the ground and handcuffed her “so tight that the handcuffs cut into her skin.”
“This lawsuit is brought to prevent this from ever happening again in the future because no officer should hold a citizen down in a pile of fire ants after they have already been detained/seized,” the complaint said.
At a news conference Saturday, Rogers said her arrest “underscores a significant issue: the absence of empathy and human compassion among some individuals in law enforcement.”
Ruben Espinoza, the police chief for the Santa Fe Independent School District, told NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston that the video does not tell the full story of what happened.
Espinoza acknowledged that Rogers did yell about ants, but he told KPRC that she was lifted from the ground seconds after she alerted the officers to the insects.
The original article contains 638 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Espinoza acknowledged that Rogers did yell about ants, but he told KPRC that she was lifted from the ground seconds after she alerted the officers to the insects.
And what? They continued to let ants bite her face? She had no less than 50 bites I’m sure and ants don’t all arrange themselves and then shout, “Bite… NOW!”
and ants don’t all arrange themselves and then shout, “Bite… NOW!”
You know, as someone who has stepped in a fire ant pile and not realized it, I am pretty sure they do. They make sure they are all well spread out, and then bam. Not that it makes any difference to this story. Just wanted to pass along my very painful experience.
Fair enough. Fire ants are annoyingly smart at times.
- An “officer came running up to her vehicle yelling for her to stop. … Rogers ‘panicked and drove the wrong way’ down a bus-only lane.” Assuming that’s accurate, then if the police tell you to stop, and you drive your vehicle away, they’re probably going to get physical with you once they catch up to you. That’s their job. Their only alternative to responding with physical force at that point is to just shrug shoulders and say “O well we tried” and let someone drive around “panicked” in unexpected places in an environment where little school children are walking around.
- I do not understand why it’s difficult to find just the long, unedited cut of the bodycam footage of what happened. Every single video I was able to find is this weirdly intercut and looped version which focuses on the one part that everyone agrees happened, where you can’t really see the context, and then it’s overlaid over someone’s interpretation of what happened, which is a whole bunch of irritating bullshit.
- With #2 in mind as a caveat, I think that reading between the lines, what happened is that they stopped her car by blocking it with their cars, pulled her out, put her on the ground to handcuff her, she started screaming about ants, and then after 13 seconds they pulled her up. Then she started struggling, and they put her back on the ground and held her there in the ant pile for a long time while they hogtied her, and that’s where all the carpet of ant bites in the photo came from.
- I am far from an ACAB person, but I do not understand what goes on in US police training that if someone’s actively struggling with you, you need to start hurting them until they calm down. I’ve seen this reaction over and over in police videos, and I think I have literally never once seen it be successful at the supposed goal. It’s just not how people operate. I get it that you need to use force if someone’s using force against the police to try to avoid getting arrested. That part actually makes sense to me. But the part where someone’s resisting getting arrested, and the cops start hurting them and then usually seem for-real surprised that now they’re struggling more, is genuinely confusing to me how they can’t figure it out.
I am far from an ACAB person, but I do not understand what goes on in US police training that if someone’s actively struggling with you
They don’t have to.
They enjoy it. The cruelty is the point.
ACAB
Look up police use of the “wrist lock”
I don’t need to; I’m already a connoisseur of Youtube videos with titles like “When entitled suspects attack” or whatever. My observation is that the wrist lock usually converts an angry and struggling person yelling “grahgabgbabrbrae” into an angry and struggling person yelling “grahbcdsbfsdhfbYOURE BREAKING MY ARMsdfkjsdflsdf”
Like I say, this might make me some kind of asshole in Lemmy-world but I am usually not on team suspect. I think if you drive away from the police, or start struggling when they try to put handcuffs on you, the police getting physical with you isn’t automatically a sign that they’re terrible people and ACAB. That is literally their job at that point, and you’re definitely still going to get arrested, just with everyone’s day including yours getting worse as a result, and more charges now maybe a felony. I feel like the whole ACAB mentality has blown up the few times a year that one cop somewhere in the country does something really fucked up into this idea that 100% of cops are terrible people and any situation that goes wrong in any way where they’re involved is 100% their fault; I don’t think that’s true. But definitely I do feel like a cop approaching someone who’s not on board with what’s going on by punishing them and expecting them to get more on board with it as a result is weird.
(One guy had a series called “Verbal Judo” which I liked quite a lot)
Police are taught to escalate situations and have a chip on their shoulder.
Some of them. In my direct experience, the number who’ve behaved that way is 0, though.
I think taking the worst of the police that are findable in a whole country’s worth of bodycam footage, and then assigning blame to every single police person based on those people, makes about as much sense as a policeman putting on an “ASAB” patch for “all suspects are bastards,” because a certain subset of the people he encounters are pieces of shit, and then deciding that every single person on the “other side” that he interacts with is the enemy.
I mean, some police do do that. I don’t think they should. I don’t think either that every single person who chooses to do a vitally necessary job for a living becomes the enemy the instant they decide to do that.
