According to a recently-released AP statement, officer David Casebolt was not displaying racist tendencies last Friday when he began to violently scream at, threaten, and eventually slam down and drag a 14-year-old girl at a pool party in McKinney, Texas. He was in fact just overly stressed, and his emotional state thrown completely out of balance, due to having responded to two suicide calls already that day. A lot of what was said sounds good... So let's do a breakdown and see what does and doesn't stink.
Let's not get into the man's past history, which includes a federal lawsuit in 2008 that involved what was apparently the racial-profiling-instigated arrest and public stripping/searching of a black man who was in a car with a white woman. The man was accused of selling drugs - apparently being called a "dope dealer" by Casebolt and whose female friend was told it was "a mistake to hang out with him" - and in the process of "investigating" he had his pants pulled down in public, he was thoroughly searched in explicit ways, and his head was slammed into the car at least once. By the way, the case against mister Brown was dropped due to lack of evidence, shocker.
Let's just focus on the now: already that day, Casebolt had responded to two suicide calls, one where a father had shot himself in front of his family while they were out by the pool, and another where he was able to successfully talk a suicidal teenager down from jumping off a roof. He claimed to be "reluctant" to respond to the initial pool-party call because of all this, but when word got out of "violent assaults" he felt the need to help respond. So, he's apparently got SOME amount of human empathy, and indeed mental and emotional stresses were running high.
Here's the problem: those stresses should have made him lash out universally, or at least randomly. Officer Casebolt instead seemed to target primarily the Black members of the group. One white woman was also "detained", but no reports about her being treated like she was in a WWE inter-gender match.
Casebolt was shown to be cursing at, threatening, and eventually drawing his weapon and pointing it at Black teenagers, because they were "becoming rowdy" and apparently "some were encouraging others to disobey the police," though aside from questioning and the venting of frustration, most of the party-goers were following commands. They called the officers "sir" and were polite and compliant, if confused. It was only after he became excessively violent to a non-combative girl that anyone got anything even close to "rowdy".
Speaking of, he later claimed that he essentially tackled Miss Beckson either because he believed her to be "fleeing the scene" (despite that she was following his orders to disperse despite being there legally) or because he thought she and her friends were being rude to him. Then, when she was sitting on the ground, he forcibly threw her down onto her face and stomach and knelt on her back. How being rude is good reason for having someone about twice your total size throw you down, drag you by your hair and then kneel his full weight on your back is a question I'm not sure I want the answer to.
The other 11 officers at the scene apparently performed their roles admirably, asking questions and getting facts before responding. I don't recall seeing any of them stepping in to stop what was obviously an abusive show of force, however, nor did they interject to stop the group of what looked like civilians that I'll dub the Shorts Brigade from acting like quasi-cops and pushing back the kids who were just trying to get the officer to stop assaulting their friend.
This past Tuesday, Officer Casebolt resigned. That's all, it was a two-word statement, "I resign." Neither apology nor explanation was made. Only now is there an explanation coming out, along with a sort-of-apology. Needless to say, the families of Dajerria Becton and the other innocent people at the party are not exactly willing to forgive and forget what was obviously an unprovoked assault.
Do I think that now-former Officer David Casebolt is a violent racist? Not normally. Overall, he actually seems to have a decent record. I'm even sure he thought he actually heard or saw things that justified what he did. However, one does not need to "normally" be a bad person to do some incredibly bad things, and when you have the power of a police force behind you, you have the power to do some INCREDIBLY bad things, having a "very stressful day" or not.