Monday, April 26, 2004

Cops Displaying

Certain members of the animal kingdom display when threatened.  Cobras unfurl their hood, rattlesnakes rattle, house cats arch their backs and hiss, and other examples abound.  Why do cops display?  To exhibit their authority.

"Eunice Crowder, you see, didn’t follow orders. Eunice was uncooperative. Worried a city employee was hauling away a family heirloom, a 90-year-old red toy wagon, she had the nerve to feel her way toward the trailer in which her yard debris was being tossed.

Enter the police. Eunice, who is hard of hearing, ignored the calls of Officers Robert Miller and Eric Zajac to leave the trailer. When she tried, unsuccessfully, to bite the hands that were laid on her, she was knocked to the ground.

When she kicked out at the cops, she was pepper-sprayed in the face with such force that her prosthetic marble eye was dislodged. As she lay on her stomach, she was Tased four times with Zajac’s electric stun gun.

And when Nellie Scott, Eunice’s 94-year-old mother, tried to rinse out her daughter’s eye with water from a two-quart Tupperware bowl, what does Miller do? According to Ernie Warren Jr., Eunice’s lawyer, the cop pushed Nellie up against a fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon."

From a story in The Oregonia titled “Even blind old ladies terrify the cops."

Via Drudge.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/26 at 05:00 AM
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