The news story is here, and the video is here.
It all started in an IHOP at 4 am, involved 4 girls going out for an early breakfast (or late dinner), two men dressed as Darth Vader and Boba Fett, and two portly police officers who slapped and then slugged a woman, pulling her dress up and flashing her panties to the entire restaurant while he's on top of her.
The woman? White, dark haired and probably a buck twenty. Definitely not a threat.
What started the melee is unclear. Freeman said she and her friends were seated at the first table near the front door of the IHOP. She was speaking to her friends about two nearby restaurant patrons who were dressed like characters -- Boba Fett and a Storm Trooper -- from the Star Wars films before the off-duty APD officer approached.
“He just attacked me,” Freeman said, “And I said, ‘What did I do? What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m sitting with my friends, and I’m talking to the Darth Vadar guys, just on a casual conversation ... and then he just out of nowhere came to me, out of all of the people, came to me,” she said later.
“I didn’t touch this man, never, not once,” she said. “I didn’t pay him any attention what he had on. I was just looking at his face because he was yelling.”
According to several videos posted on YouTube.com, the officer, whose name police have not provided, shouted at a woman sitting in the corner of a booth near the door and then he lunged at her. A woman wearing a black dress appeared to be trying to separate the officer and her friend when the officer slapped her. The woman in the black dress hit him back, and he punched her in the face.
A second officer came up just as the struggle began. He got involved when it became physical between the first cop and the woman in the black dress, apparently trying to separate them. The first officer pulled the woman away from the table, threw her onto the floor and laid on top of her while trying to get handcuffs on one wrist. The second wrist was cuffed when she turned over on her stomach.
Within moments, a female officer appeared to hold back the crowd while the woman in the black dress, shoeless, was led out of the restaurant.
The officer involved in the incident has been placed on administrative duty pending the outcome of an investigation, an Atlanta police spokesman said.
For more on police brutality in America, please continue below the fold.
Reiss (1971) defines police brutality as any practice that degrades citizen status or “that restricts their freedom and that annoys or harasses them,” or uses unnecessary or unwarranted physical force. Langworthy and Travis (1994) argue that police brutality erodes the public trust in the police, lowers officer morale and generates conflict between officers and residents (which in turn decreases the officers’ ability to get quality information and hampers investigations into crimes).
Police brutality is a subset of general misconduct; the only current source for statistics on police misconduct is The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting (or NPMSR) (Packman, 2010), which compiles media reports of police misconduct into an open and verifiable database. The last project to ascertain police misconduct on a national scale was in 2002 (Liqun Cao), which concluded that officer leaders play the biggest role in reducing citizen complaints through increased in-service training, taking an active interest in the education interests of officers, and providing the best training for officers.
The NPMSR has information from over 17,000 police districts, and paints the picture of police brutality in America as fairly grim. While the quarterly rate of misconduct is 0.835%, over the average career span of 25 years, 1 in 5 officers will be alleged to have engaged in misconduct. In 2010 so far, of the 2,541 media reports of misconduct, 23.3% were for excessive force and 13.1% of these were fatalities. The top 5 states for misconduct per capita of 100,000 officers are Oklahoma (2105.26), Montana (1938.22), Vermont (1839.93), West Virginia (1789.47) and Tennessee (1764.44); while the least misconduct per capita were Maine (356.35), Arkansas (362.80), Kansas (381.74), Idaho (446.76) and North Dakota (490.20).
For the entire nation, 33% of misconduct allegations resulted in a conviction, and of those convicted, 64% of officers received prison sentences with an average term of 14 months. From April 2009 to June 2010, there were 5,986 reports of misconduct, with 382 fatalities by officers and $347,455,000 spent in related settlements and judgments. Also according to NPMSR, the top 5 counties with the most misconduct (and employing over 1000+ officers) were Palm Beach County, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Washington DC; Baltimore, Maryland; and Dallas, Texas. In comparison to the general public, the police are more likely to engage in misconduct, as the US median was 848.41 per 100k while police officers are at 980.64 per 100k. Twenty-one types of misconduct were coded by the NPMSR, with the top three types listed as Brutality (18.1%), Sex (11.9%) and Fraud/Theft (8.9%). In short, the professional police in the United States have a large number of officers engaged in criminal conduct, a systemic (when using per capita figures) practice with hot spots in large urban centers and prevalence in rural areas.
References
Reiss, A. (1971). The police and the public. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press.
Cao, L. (2002). Curbing police brutality: What works? A reanalysis of citizen complaints at the organizational level, final report. Accessed Dec. 2 2010 from http://www.ncjrs.gov/...
NPMSR, http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/ , Packman
The above is part of an as yet unpublished narrative analysis about the Oscar Grant shooting as part of my PhD program in Comm Studies at a Midwestern Tier 1 University.
Regarding this incident, based on the NPMSR's statistics, the south is more likely to have police acting inappropriately. This has everything to do with transparency, regulations and holding cops accountable for thuggish behavior.
Here's the thing about cops in America; they have a really strong narrative painting them as heroes or someone to trust. We tell our children in school not to be afraid of cops, despite the fact they carry firearms. We are trained to trust police officers, but the data shows that the more you have personal experience with the legal system (especially police officers), the less you like it, and the more depressed/suicidal you become.
Was this woman wronged? Definitely. Are these cops testilying? We do not know, but I'd probably bet the farm on it when they do take the stand. The legal system is definitely weighted against citizens when cops assault us. What is the cure? Strict regulation.
Regulate a cop's ammo supply, making them account for every slug. Use of a firearm or ammo not provided by the police department is grounds for immediate removal and prosecution.
Regulate a cop's video camera, so they cannot turn it off. In fact, put a camera inside the cop's vehicle, because most cops who rape women do it in the back seat.
And most importantly, rotate partners and assign accountability officers to break up grift and corruption.
Oh, and will the women sue the department? Yeah, I think they have a strong case. Especially when the cops lie in their police report. Why? Because that's what police do when they are in the wrong. Because they have a long history of getting away with it.
EDIT UPDATE: Apparently some commentators are having trouble with descriptives of persons involved in the incident. If you have a problem with the word "white" for the victim, why don't you also have problems with the word "woman" too? Racism and Patriarchy are both ideologies that have connotations and values. The words "white" and "woman" and the weights of the participants involved are simply for description. An officer, who outweighs a citizen by a sizeable amount, who has more cultural power and also official power, assaulted a citizen. Watch the video, read the story and do not make personal attacks.