'Officer of the Year' Caught on Camera Attacking Man Who Asked for Help

[Jackpine Radical]

19. I sometimes wonder if we're not just hearing more about it these days.

Certainly the cops have been attacking the populace for many years.

Haymarket Square comes to mind. I also have an acquaintance who had been a captain in the State Patrol who talks about his time on the force, many years ago, when he and others would find any excuse to beat the hell out of motorists they had stopped.

There were no squad car cameras in those days. He also said that when he went to court to testify, when he swore to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," he modified it in his head to "the truth, the whole truth, and whatever it takes to convict the sonofabitch."

I also think of the many stories I heard in Milwaukee years ago about a brutal police chief named Breier and his out-of-control cops with their throw-down weapons running roughshod over minority neighborhoods.

Maybe we've had for a cop problem for generations but we're just now recognizing it because of the universality of recording devices. The cops' version of the story was all that ever got out to the public in the past, but the power of the citizenry to document events and distribute the documentation via Youtube, etc. has leapt upward in scale by at least a couple of orders of magnitude in recent years.