I'm saying it wasn't unnecessary. What she did could have seriously injured him. The ideal thing to do would be to put her down and handcuff her properly, but I don't fault the officer for reaching the way he did. It seems to me that if this wasn't a woman, nobody in this thread would be rushing to call this brutality.
What if she had a gun? Do you know she doesn't have one? Does the cop? Did they search her before carrying her off? How do they know? How do you know? We can play what-if all day and justify a taze-on-sight policy. Any action could seriously injur the cops. One of the cops could have fell down while carrying her and hit his head on concrete and died.
Risk-assessment is a complex subject and takes lots of work to do correctly. It's not something that can usually be done by the average person in a split second. Besides, we know how the cop felt about his safety by watching the video. If he feared for his well-being he would have put her down and handcuffed her after she hit him. Instead he hit her and then kept going. It was a knee-jerk reaction on his part. Not some careful consideration of risk that he learned from years on duty.
I'm saying that the specific action she did was agressive and would reasonably injure a person. I don't like seeing people be punched in the face by police, but I do not fault the officer for reacting the way he did in this case I do fault them for not restraining her in the first place, though.
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u/EricFromWV Nov 05 '17
I'm saying it wasn't unnecessary. What she did could have seriously injured him. The ideal thing to do would be to put her down and handcuff her properly, but I don't fault the officer for reaching the way he did. It seems to me that if this wasn't a woman, nobody in this thread would be rushing to call this brutality.