Mobile Alabama police pepper sprayed and tasered a deaf and mentally disabled man in order to remove him from the bathroom of a retail store. Then they “attempted to book him on resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer.” The suspect/target/victim was a black man.
Now let me propose: if it had been “regular” citizens — a gang, a group of store employees, a pissed-off shopper who wanted to use the bathroom — who had forcefully dragged the man out of the bathroom, there would be no end to the outcries about violence, discrimination, racism, etc. etc.
However, when agents of the state do it, wearing uniforms and using more firepower than most citizens could ever deploy, somehow it may be “justified” — and further, they try to charge the target/victim with an array of crimes in “resisting” them (I’d really like to know how a deaf man behind a door could ever be successfully charged and convicted of “disobeying a police order”).
It’s impossible to imagine how the cops on the scene perceived the situation. What scenario did they imagine they were a part of? Was the man on the other side of the door building a bomb or something? It seems ridiculous.
What if it had been someone facing some kind of medical emergency (heart attack, stroke) who was unable to respond? Certainly their pepper spray would have heightened his chances of survival.
This militaristic “shoot first” attitude has to go away.
