By Dave Lindorff
Watching the police response to the nationwide uprising against police brutality is by turns infuriating and depressing.
It hardly matters whether or not it’s a minority of police officer who are behaving as the “pigs” we used to call them back in the 1960s and ‘70s, because if they can do the kinds of things we see, thanks to the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, and the so-called “good cops” on police forces don’t immediately act to stop the actions of bad cops, the whole system is rotten.
Today, it’s personal for me, as I watch a video of militarized cops and camo-clad troops sweeping a street and the sidewalks straddling it of pedestrians. As they march along like advancing Nazi stormtroopers, they come on a tall thin elderly white man of 75 who is standing facing them, described as a “protester” in reports. He calmly walks towards one of the officers, arms down and hands empty, and begins talking calmly. Instead of responding or ignoring and walking around him, the cop he’s addressing just suddenly shoves him hard in the chest so he falls backward and down hard, banging his head on the concrete and, apparently, losing consciousness and bleeding from his ear.
As the police, including his attacker, march on past the injured man, one officer stops, turns and starts to bend over to check on the victim, but the cop walking along just behind him pushes him to make him move on, after which the other officers following just keep walking on by the man, while other cops can be heard yelling at bystanders who clearly are trying to cross over the sidewalk to help the injured and bleeding man, telling them to “Get back! Get back!”
This entire incident was videotaped by a local WKBW TV crew, and the station reports that the injured man is now in a hospital where he’s listed in “serious but stable” condition. It also reports that Buffalo’s Mayor Byron Brown says two cops involved in the incident — presumably the thug who pushed the man for no reason and walked on, and the cop who prevented a colleague from stopping to help — have been suspended without pay based upon the video footage, which belies the Police Department’s blatant lie that the shoved man “apparently tripped” and fell.
It’s the same story over and over, I know, and many police victims, especially this who are black, have had even more serious consequences, but this case could have been me so it hits home harder. I’m 71 and, like this victim of police abuse, I’m white.
This horror of police brutality and police privilege and invulnerability is a cancer that affects all of us in this country.
I’ve been a protester since I turned 17 and became an anti-war activist. I first experienced “police” brutality a year later for the first time when I was arrested while peacefully protesting the Vietnam War during a march on the Pentagon…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/cop-pushes-old-white-man-over-backwards-leaves-victim-bleeding-and-unconscious-after-head-hits-sidewalk-hard/