Posted to numerous social media sites late yesterday was this video of a woman and her daughter being arrested by a Fort Worth, Texas police officer. Their crime? Being angry at police officer for not confronting the subject of the complaint: the white male adult who had allegedly choked the woman’s seven-year-old son. In the video, the police officer asks the woman what seems to be the problem. She responds that her seven-year-old was choked by this white guy because, according to the white guy, the kid defied him. The guy says that the kids threw some paper on the ground—he littered—and when the man asked the kid to pick the paper up the kid didn’t and so he choked him.*
The police officer is clearly striking an aggressive pose with this woman and it’s obvious that she’s the one on street trial here, not the cowardly piece of shit white guy picking at his fingers like a 10-year-old in the background. The woman explains that this man knows where she lives, she and her kids have lived in the neighborhood for years, and that the man should have come and told her. Fair enough. Then the police officer says this:
Why don’t you teach your son not to litter.
Just. Wow. From here the mother gets more and more angry, as is her right. She does not step closer to the officer, but the officer says that if this woman keeps yelling at him “I’m going to get angry.” This is a straight-up threat. The mother continues to explain in justifiable anger that it is not the police officer’s job to tell her what she has or hasn’t told her son. She even has to explain to him that kids don’t always do what you tell them. Her teenage daughter then steps in front of her mother and the police officer uses that as an excuse to tackle both mother and daughter and arrest them both.
The video is brutal and this police officer should be punished in a serious way.
*Totally against the law.