Are We Sick Of Hearing This Shit Yet?

Cop Punches 17-Year-Old Girl in the Face … Over Jay-Walking

According to Seattle Police, this poor cop’s fist was brutally assaulted by the face of a 17-year old girl:

Seattle police are investigating what they call an assault of an officer in South Seattle.
However, a police officer is seen punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during the incident captured by a video camera on Monday.

According to Seattle police, the incident began when an officer spotted a man jaywalking in the 3100 block of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. at approximately 3:10 p.m. The man was some 15 feet away from a pedestrian overpass, police said.

The officer was talking to the man when he saw four young women jaywalk across the same street at the same spot. The officer asked the women to step over to his patrol car, but the women were being “verbally antagonistic toward the officer,” according to officials…
The girl then “began to tense up her arm, and pull away from the officer while yelling at him,” investigators said.

So naturally he socked her. The video’s below.


People generally evaluate these incidents based only on the final moments. Did the cop feel threatened at the moment he threw the punch? I don’t think that’s the key issue here. As Radley Balko (who gets a hat-tip for the story) points out:

Seems to me that the mistake came earlier: This started as a jaywalking citation. Was it it really so important that the woman get a jaywalking fine that she needed to be chased down and thrown against the patrol car? Even if she was trying to avoid the fine, seems like at some point you realize what’s at stake here (a single incident of someone undermining your authority to get away with a petty crime), and just let it go.

Yet again I’ll ask (as I always do): might this cop have been hopped up on steroids? Update: here’s another video of a different cop (also white) punching another young woman (also black) 4 times in the face in 2009 for riding her bicycle on a sidewalk.
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