This can’t be happening…
…AGAIN.
Oh, but it is. On the heels of the now infamous Christopher Dorner manifesto in which he alleges police misconduct and corruption running rampant in the LAPD, we here in Philadelphia find ourselves faced with our own misconduct…
Last year during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, PPD officer Jonathan Josey was observed… ON CAMERA… PUNCHING A WOMAN IN THE FACE. See the video below:
The officer was found not guilty of simple assault on Tuesday.
Although the woman had not attacked the officers, in the first few frames of the video she appears to be yelling, which is not a crime punishable by punching someone in the face. This officer, a 19 year veteran of the force, thought it prudent to mollywhop this woman in the face so hard that he bloodied her nose and dropped her to the ground, immediately handcuffing her. The craziest, and most disheartening part of this whole story is that his defense wasn’t even plausible. Although he can be seen in his white shirt coming from behind a sea of blue shirts, he felt that this woman had done something that warranted being PUNCHED in the FACE. I suppose the other 10 officers around him couldn’t have disarmed the woman? Her defense is that she simply sprayed silly string into the crowd, which may be what we see her doing in the first frames of the video. The officer’s defense? He was trying to knock her beer out of her hand…
HAVE YOU SEEN THE VIDEO???
In the moments before and in the first frames of the video, a car drives by throwing beer on the officers. Make no mistake, that behavior was childish and disrespectful. There are officers out there risking their lives every day. There are officers out there who actually care about the neighborhoods and neighbors they serve. Disrespectful treatment of any officer isn’t the way to show our distrust of the system, and rarely ever ends in the way we would like.
The problem comes when we examine the situation (and the footage) further and realize that the action the officer exhibited was a total misuse and abuse of force. If he thought she had thrown beer, that is in fact disrespectful, but punching the woman in the face is NOT THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE. EVER. She wasn’t armed. She wasn’t threatening to hit the officer with the bottle… she was WALKING AWAY when she was punched. FROM BEHIND.
I’m not buying it. AT ALL.
But that’s apparently what happens in our country. Police get to punch and bloody women in the face with no impunity. Had SHE punched and bloodied the officer, there is no question where she would be right now. Had it been myself and any one of my friends, someone would be IN JAIL. That was ASSAULT, plain and simple. And this officer gets to go on and fight for his job back, and probably GET it… and feel invincible in knowing he can do ANYTHING HE WANTS to the citizens of this city AND GET AWAY WITH IT.
But Dorner was the crazy one, right???
This is what passes for justice… one set of rules for us… one set of rules for them on the other side of the thin, blue line…
And they were wondering why people were out here supporting Dorner… we live our lives on the wrong side of the blue line, a line he was once on both sides of. And for an ex-cop to have been humiliated by his own department, to be stripped of your dignity and your good name… for nothing more than standing up for someone… we understood Dorner because we know that on the other side of that blue line, we don’t exist. We are expendable. We are the enemy… we are all criminals, at the whim of the officers charged with SERVING and PROTECTING us. On any given day, if the mood so strikes, we can be beaten and accused of a crime we never committed by an officer with a chip on their shoulder. And we can’t trust our legal system to get US any justice.
Josey will undoubtedly get his job back… and Ms. Guzman will undoubtedly never be able to call a police officer when she is in trouble. Either she will be reminded of that not guilty verdict and think twice or she will be treated like dirt because she will be known as the woman who sued an officer… and lost.
And they wonder why we STILL don’t trust the police…
Crossing the Thin Blue Line: When the Police No Longer Serve and Protect,