The Horror Every Day: Why Police Brutality Goes Unpunished

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/horror-every-day-why-police-brutality-goes-unpunished



Sebastian Prevot watched helplessly as three police officers advanced on his wife. Prevot was handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cop car. Half of his left ear dangled where it had been torn from his head. The Houston Police Department doesn’t deny that its officers gave Prevot these injuries during a late-night arrest in January 2012. The only dispute is whether he earned them.

Prevot had been returning home from a night out with a friend. He was two miles from his house when he stopped just past the white line at a four-way stop sign. Two officers in a patrol car tried to pull him over, but he kept driving. Prevot says he didn’t want to pull over and continued home—“going the speed limit, stopping at every stop sign”—because he knew he was about to be detained and have his car impounded.

“My kids had to go to school in the morning,” he told me. “My wife had to go to work.”

Prevot sits across from me in a noisy McDonald’s at dusk. He’s 30, married, with three little boys. In 2009 Prevot was one semester away from getting his bachelor’s degree in marketing when his wife, Annika Lewis, was promoted at her job with AT&T, and the family moved to Houston from Lafayette, Louisiana. Now he takes care of his sons, ages 7, 5, and 4, coaches youth sports and looks for work. His left ear still bears a crosshatching of paler brown where an emergency room doctor stitched it up on January 27, 2012, the night he should have stopped.

[countryjake]

1. Excellent article. Well worth the read!

An eight-monthTexas Observer investigation found that during the past six years, Houston civilians reported officers for “use of force”—the department’s term for police brutality—588 times. The Internal Affairs division investigated each complaint and dismissed all but four.

In the same period, Houston cops reported other officers for excessive force 118 times. Internal Affairs dismissed all but 11.

I hope, at the least, that Mr. Prevot will be able to get his car back. That part toward the end where he speaks about how they began to act more like normal men, after being with him so long in the hospital...they must imagine themselves robo-cops or something when they go into action and brutalize. Sick.

[TBF]

2. Long history of this in HPD. K&R nt

[Jefferson23]

3. Disgraceful..where the hell are the civil rights attorneys..they should be all over this bullshit.

K&R

[mahannah]

4. It seems that one rarely needs to “earn” injuries when the police are involved.

[jsr]

5. 'Put your hands behind your back!’ But they’re standing on my hands

Sneaky thugs.

[LittleGirl]

6. OMG

I can't believe this shit. I will NEVER go to Texas. Never.

[sendero]

7. But we don't live in a police state..

.... so stop saying that!

[DeSwiss]

9. Police-state Lite then. n/t

[sendero]

10. A puppy...

.. is still a dog. We may not be East Germany yet, but we are firmly headed in that direction.

[DeSwiss]

11. Agreed.....

...that we're not quite there yet. But we've always been a Police-state to everyone else, and everywhere else in the world.

[DeSwiss]

8. K&R

''Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.''~Frederick Douglass

- Wake. Up.

[99Forever]

12. Yeah but...

... that cop in New York gave a shirt to a homeless guy and the one Boston brought some milk...

Doesn't that make what the rest of them do okay?

[TeeYiYi]

14. You, clearly, have not yet seen this...

TYY

[seveneyes]

13. Looks like police abuse

A good lawyer should be able to help this poor man. Even if the local justice system is corrupt, it should be appealed up the chain until the guilty police, and everyone else is brought to justice.