Judging the Cops
On an autumn night last year a 16-year-old high school student, Thai Gurule, was crossing a street in Portland, Oregon, accompanied by his older brother and a few friends. No one was breaking the law, being disruptive, or acting suspiciously. Yet the black teenager would soon be stopped by police officers without probable cause, illegally detained, shoved off his feet onto the ground, punched multiple times in the torso, kneed in the stomach, grabbed by the hair, and Tased.
He would later be charged with assaulting a public safety officer, resisting arrest, and attempted strangulation, per the narrative of the cops who wrote the police report."
*But thanks in part to bystanders who captured video of this teen's encounter with police, Judge Diana Stuart acquitted him last week. After being illegally stopped, her ruling acknowledged, the youth did tense his arms, struggle to stay on his feet, and flail around with his limbs. But he did so to protect himself from "senseless and aggressive" violence that "a reasonable person would have felt was excessive force," she found, adding that police misrepresented parts of the encounter in their report, which she did not find credible after reviewing the video evidence."
*Portland police union president Daryl Turner on Monday decried a Multnomah County judge's findings last week that officers used excessive force in the arrest of a 16-year-old boy. Turner called the ruling "unfair'' and "discouraging,'' and questioned the judge's authority to second-guess the officers."
He doesn't just complain that the case was wrongly decided. As he sees it, judges never have any business evaluating police actions or assessing the credibility of their testimony. What does he think trials are for if not to understand what happened with the benefit of hindsight? Why does he imagine that police officers are cross-examined if there is no need to determine if they are credible? His are the words of a police representative whose civic knowledge has atrophied due to years of enjoying excessive deference. Basic safeguards strike him as "discouraging."
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/where-excessive-force-meets-resisting-arrest/388297/
= new reply since forum marked as read
insane. That is all. 
