Click here to visit the new home of Blackvoices!

HOT ON HUFFPOST BLACKVOICES:

 

Categories

Contributors

Other BV Blogs

NJ Officer Taped Pepper-Spraying Detained Black Man

By Boyce Watkins, PhD on Jun 12th 2010 8:40PM
Filed under: News, Politics, Race and Civil Rights

Comments (116)

N.J. Officer Taped Pepper Spraying Detained Black Man

I am not quite sure what to make of the ruffled YouTube video that is now scouring the web out of Paterson, New Jersey. In the video, the woman filming, who mentions that her mother works in the sheriff's office, is taping a New Jersey police officer holding a black man to the ground. The man clearly has his hands behind his back and appears to be restrained.

As the woman videos the incident from a distance, the officer inexplicably grabs the man, turns him around and puts pepper spray in to his eyes. He appears to do it twice.
Noticing the woman in the background and people watching, the officer picks the defendant up off the ground and approaches the group using quite a bit of profane language. He also mentions something about whether or not the woman saw crack on the ground around the defendant. The video is certainly disturbing, and better video resolution might have been helpful to determine what was going on. All the while, you could clearly see some disturbing actions in the video, which might likely be a case of very serious police brutality.

While we should leave it to the court of law to decide exactly what happened in this incident, here are some quick thoughts that went through my mind:

1) (The obvious one) For what reason did the officer feel the need to put pepper spray into the eyes of a suspect who'd already been detained? If he is lying on the ground with his hands secured behind his back, it makes no sense to spray something in his eyes. This kind of cruel and unusual punishment is not justified just because the person is accused of committing a crime.

2) Why does the officer feel that it is acceptable or necessary to tell innocent bystanders to "get the f*ck out of here, unless you wanna go with him"? Sorry officer, but you must understand that your authority over the citizens of the community is not absolute. You have no right to use abusive and disrespectful language toward citizens, the same way they are not allowed to be disrespectful toward you. Secondly, the idea that the officer believes that he can threaten to take people to jail because they were observing and evaluating him conducting his duties is incredibly problematic.

3) How often does this happen in cases that go unreported? For every case in which someone happens to be standing around taping an incident, there are likely thousands of other cases we don't know about. If police officers wonder why the community has a difficult time trusting them, incidents like this are the reason why.

The bottom line is that part of the reason the relationship between police officers and the black community is so fractured (even worse in Paterson, N.J.) is because officers sometimes believe that it's OK to keep the entire community in a frightened police state. Officers, who are often unable to sort out the bad from the good, tear down the doors of innocent citizens in drug raids and don't even fix the damage that was done to the house (this happened to a friend of mine twice when she was a little girl). They stop black men and harass us without just cause for doing so. They sometimes even beat the heck out of 15-year-old kids.

Now, the most egregious behavior doesn't happen in every precinct and is not committed by every officer., but this video is a reminder that there must be a new paradigm of police interaction with the community. Officers must understand that they are positioned to work with the community and not against it. While it appears that the young man in this video may have done something wrong, the idea of spraying him, cursing at citizens and threatening to take them to jail just for watching is absolutely unacceptable. There needs to be an investigation.

The video is below if you'd like to watch:







Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

Comments: (116)

Add a comment

Page 1 of 12

Add a Comment

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed but they are required to confirm your comments. When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password."

Most Commented Articles

Daily Drama

The Best Clips From TV's Hottest Shows

More Daily Drama >>

Find a Message Board

Discover conversations on everyone from Barack to Beyonce. There are nearly 50 forums, so click on a category below and find the right one for you.