“Sorry, race has nothing at all to do with this. If you look at the photograph of the suspect it looks like the twin brother of Mr Blake,” Bratton told CNN. “So let’s put that nonsense to rest right now, race has nothing to do with this. We have a witness who identified Mr Blake as an individual who he had sold a phone to and had been given a false credit card.”That ignores the central point of the entire fracas. The issue is not whether or not some snitch wrongly identified Mr. Blake. The issue is about the fact that Mr. Blake was just standing there, not running, not doing anything other than waiting for his car when a plainclothes cop bumrushed him and bodyslammed him to the sidewalk.
That's the issue: Clearly excessive force used by NYPD cops (more than one was involved) with a clear suspicion by everyone, other than Billy the Idiot, that the only reason why the cops felt free to accost Mr. Blake and slam him down on the sidewalk was because Mr. Blake is black.
UPDATE: The cop who assaulted Mr. Blake is now riding a desk and it's possible that all of them are going to be fried for not filing a "void arrest report". And the assailant has a history of excessive force complaints.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it could be some of both...
ReplyDelete-Doug in Oakland
When I first watched the video of the arrest I thought I was looking at a mugging. Mr. Blake was chillin', leaning against a pillar in front of the hotel, looking at his iPhone like 99% of the rest of America does nowadays when waiting around, and then this guy wearing a t-shirt and jeans without saying a word just grabs his arm, slams him into a wall, then slams him onto pavement.
ReplyDeleteYou can bet that if Mr. Blake were white, he would have been asked for his ID, he wouldn't have been slammed into a wall. He would have handed over his ID, cop would have looked at it, realized this wasn't the dude he was looking for, and moved on. But because Mr. Blake is black, the cop felt he could get away with taking out some of his 'roid rage on a n***er.
Frankly, I don't even understand how this cop could qualify to be a plainclothes officer. Usually when a cop fucks up like this cop already had they put him back in uniform. They don't reward him with plainclothes duty. But that's the NYPD for ya...