All of the videos I see online of cops using excessive force seem insane, especially considering they were wearing body cameras. But what was police brutality like before they could be held accountable through video evidence?
All of the videos I see online of cops using excessive force seem insane, especially considering they were wearing body cameras. But what was police brutality like before they could be held accountable through video evidence?
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You just got beat up. If you were going to be taking the ride downtown then you’d catch a beating no mattet how innocent you were. It wasn’t right but it happened all the time.
Well, the cops beat people up and they couldn’t do a f*****g thing about it. Why; were you expecting a different answer?
I’m a gay man, and I remember as recently as the late 1980’s an unmarked police car slowly driving down the side streets around a gay bar in a “liberal” city in the northeast, writing license plate #s down. I’ve known people who got beat up by the cops in lieu of being arrested. Down south in the 1960’s, there were a couple of times that cracker Klansmen sheriff deputies even participated in premeditated murders.
I remember a retired cop told me this. They would tie a guy to a chair, and place a phonebook over the guy’s knee. Then they would hit the phone book several times with a billy club.
It didn’t leave a mark, but it would hurt the guy a lot.
Up until about WWII police would arrest strangers to were in there area for no reason and put them in forced labor prisons. Around this time, they got a man for the crime of being black, who just so happened to also be rich. The issue came to a head when the rich were threatened.
There have been a lot of years between WWII and cellphones. A lot of different people have been targeted in different locations.
I know that I have had my head slammed into the hood of a cop car (15 at the time) I have had guns to my head for littering, and have been robbed and “intimidated”.
If i remember correctly someone hand a hand held vhs camcorder to video tape Rodney King Being beaten by the LAPD.
Police weren’t dressed and tooled up like the military getting ready for combat.
They didn’t wear Kevlar vests. They typically had a revolver and maybe a club and some handcuffs. They were friendlier and knew their “beats”.
Criminals have become more-heavily armed and more organized unfortunately. I never understood why police wear camouflage. It’s not like they’re going to war. I find it excessive.
There’s always been a “few bad apples”. They didn’t have any problem smacking you around.
You got beaten, shot, I had police come in guns drawn to my place of employment because I was working late cleaning up. I could have easily been shot
You had to cooperate and do what the officer says.
There was never a problem with police brutality. The wrong ‘un fell down the stairs to the cells all by himself. Yes, I know we don’t have stairs down to our cells but that’s what happened!
“You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride” is not a recent invention.
Police in my town got away with murder. Racists, bigots, wife beaters, you name it. In the 70s cops laid dead possums at the door of Black owned businesses, and after they murdered Tony Stevenson using an illegal choke hold, they made and sold t-shirts that said “Don’t choke em, Smoke em”. Yeah, I’ve never trusted police.
They used to call it a “tune up”. They got away with it more back then.
We called them Pigs for a reason
Police officers were/are considered “Professional” witnesses so whatever they said was true and that was all that counted.
You were free to say and/or ask whatever but it was the officer word against yours and once again they were professional witnesses so their testimony was all that counted.
Cameras have changed all that.
I had my hands in my pockets and got thrown into a car. Then he opened the door and got me in. Nice as could be afterwards. I think his nickname was horsekick
You learned to be very passive when dealing with police. Far too many head injuries after “accidental falls”
Way, way worse.
I was naive, I didn’t believe cops actually did stuff like that. But I’ve seen enough videos in the past 15 or so years to dispel that notion. I’ve also seen enough videos of people acting like absolute idiots on traffic stops – running from the police, mouthing off, fighting, and so on. Awful people on both sides.
My husband was badly beaten by the cops as a 20 year old kid. He was high on acid and didn’t comply with their instructions when they stopped him while he was walking down the sidewalk, so they beat the shit out him using their nightsticks. He was charged with resisting arrest, attacking a police officer, and a few other charges. In reality, he just refused to get on the ground when they ordered him to. Being high, he thought they were the devil and his minions (which wasn’t far from the truth). This was in Southern California in 1987. The cops were LAPD. As I’m sure many of you remember, the LAPD had a bad reputation for police brutality back in the day.
My MIL took photos of his injuries the next day when she bailed him out of jail, as well as contacting a family friend who was a criminal attorney. I’m not sure what happened, but the charges were dropped. We still have the photos.
LOL sometimes calling them was worse then getting robbed. I’ll never forget hanging out with a friend and his dad was a cop. I honestly don’t know how the in the f**k world they let him be one. A bunch of them decided to get drunk, and with his service revolver, shoot at sneakers someone hung up on a pole. this was like 8 at night, what were you gonna do call the cops on him? he was the cops.
Sometimes you would run into a decent one thou, not much but sometimes. Plenty of guys hit their heads on the squad car as they were arresting them.
It was cops the enforced everything that made Green Book a thing.
Also cops were if possible even more corrupt 60 years ago than they are today. Every major city had cops on the payroll of organized crime and everyone knew it.
There was one “riot” at the University of Az around 1972-3. A group of 20-30 homeless hippy types threw some bottles at campus police, who felt overwhelmed and called in Tucson police. A lot of kids got chased and bruised, bc we all looked alike in the evening. Kids were leaving late classes, going back and forth from the dorms to the cafeteria, etc. A friend who worked for one of he TV stations was trying to enter campus with a cameraman, his car was clearly marked with the station’s News logo, and the cops drove them out by pounding both sides of the car with clubs.
My mom was a nurse at the University health care center. One of her patients showed up two weeks later on crutches. He’d been waiting just off campus at a pay phone for a call from his dad, when cops showed up and beat the shit out of him, just bc.
Well let me tell you a few stories. My cousin was part Native American and part Irish. From the time he was a teenager to the day he died he was drunk. One day he drove into Baltimore while drunk and a cop turned on his lights to pull him over but he didn’t stop. He drove about a mile or two until another cop blocked him. Because he didn’t stop right away they yanked him out of the car and severely beat him. He said a cop stood over him and stomped on his face repeatedly while he was handcuffed. He was beaten so severely he spent two weeks in the hospital and his face was so disfigured his own wife didn’t recognized him and thought she entered the wrong hospital room. He filed police brutality charges and they simply claimed his injuries occurred because he resisted. He claimed he didn’t. Because of the severe beating that nearly killed him and the hospital stay, they trumped up a bunch of fake charges. He ended up getting sentenced to 5 years in prison and did about 2 and a half in a bad prison.
Another time our next door neighbor and his wife got into an argument and she called the police. I witnesses this. The cop arrived and told him to leave pointing down the road. Doug said where and I supposed to go? The cop said I don’t give a fuck, start walking. So Doug started walking got like 30 feet, turned around and said but it’s my house. The cop launched at him in a full speed sprint. Grabbed Doug’s arm and spun him around so he went airborn and landed face first in the gravel driveway knocking out his front teeth. The cop jumped on him and punched him repeatedly in the face. He then arrested him. Again he and his wife filed police brutality charges and the cop simply claimed he resisted and that ended it.
I read about this in the newspaper. A man and his wife went to the hospital got angry over something and left. The police then showed up at his door and told them to get off his property and locked the door. The cop kicked the door open and the guy picked up a plastic lawn chair and held it up between him and the cop. The cop then shot him in the face and he turned away and the cop shit him in the back. He survived and the shooting went to court and the judge decided the cop didn’t use excessive force because he was brandishing the lawn chair as a weapon.
I think all these cases would have gone differently had cameras been present.
Anyone of any color died. Brutally.
It was our word against theirs and that was the end of it.
If you looked at a cop the wrong way, you got your ass beat. You could get your ass beaten if they just didn’t like the way you looked.
On the other hand, there were “courtesy cards” or “get out of jail free” cards. If you were friends with a cop, some of them would give you one of these cards. If you got stopped by a cop for anything non-violent and showed the card, they would let you slide.
The vast majority of people in the US believed whatever idiot story the cops told them. The best one being the kid pulled out the fake gun and pointed it at me. We’ve yet to see a body cam video of this preposterous scenario playing out. Imagine that, people don’t try to shoot cops with toy guns.
The real thing to get your head behind is how did civilians act? Every human being was beaten for I figure the last 100,000 years. It was worse before that
Most of the “police brutality” you see today are out of context video clips. Notice how you never get the full story.
As a trouble making teen girl , I did not get beat up, but I got felt up. I was powerless, with no body cams, no bystander shooting the scene and my word against theirs.
Depended on the location. In my region there was one county that had jerk officers who enjoyed hurting people (and sometimes making people ‘disappear’), but in the surrounding counties the officers were laid-back, sensible, and far more intelligent. The same exists today.
In the bad county today, when rural residents see a sheriff’s car coming down the dirt road, the first thing that the residents do is to go inside their homes and get a gun. Yes, it really is that bad.
Watch some of those old movies from the 70s. True life right there. They did what they wanted because no one held them accountable.
Miami Race Riots- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Miami_riots
Me and a Black Jamaican friend were smoking something in 1982 Miami and cops showed up. White boy me was told to go home, he was kept for a bit longer. Luckily for him, I had the hash and pipe in my pocket.
Before the police were militarized they weren’t so gung ho.
Rodney king tape was the first time Americans, all americans I mean, saw violence from the police. And it was a total shock to some. Even though I’m white I was also poor, and saw the blatant hypocrisy of the police prior to that. That’s a story for another day. Nobody saw it until camcorders were a thing and I am so glad someone finally captured it. They deserved to be named and shamed, and deserved prison time. Would have gotten it too if they hadn’t changed venues to a lily white rich neighborhood.
What was it like for all of human history until like 18 years ago?
Go watch cop shows from the late 60s and early 70s and see how cops being called pigs and racial violence comes up as a plot device.
It was the first time violent cops were really confronted in any kind of significant way in popular media like prime time television.
It was still mostly dealt with in a bullshit way and if any cops were singled out as dirty they were treated as a single bad cop and not the whole system being rotten, but it demonstrates that everything you see now is nothing new and it wasn’t new then either.
Wasn’t new in the 50s, the 30s, etc.
Cops have always been like this.
House got broken into.
Cops look around
Cops go find the nearest black person
If no blacks can be found they grabbed the nearest Jew, Irish, or asian
If none can be found they find the nearest homeless person
They take them to the station
They beat the suspect until they confess
Suspect gets sent to prison
Police cheer for themselves for taking a dangerous criminal off the street and making the community safer
It was the same…. but without cameras.
No one knows it seems that kind of history didn’t exist
They’re accountable?
Why is it automatically considered brutality? Cop shows up, drunk is beating his wife, won’t stop. So, he gets the hickory shampoo, a knock on the head with a nightstick. Compliance was an issue then and violence was stopped in its tracks before more people got hurt – like, the cop, who would get treated on the taxpayers dime – which you and I pay.
We all agreed that those acting up were not in our best interests, if they needed negative attention they got all they wanted. People actually do that to see where boundaries are, most back then were disciplined by parents – they got spankings. Now nobody spanks their kids and ten year olds are looting Walgreens forcing us to wait around for a clerk to open the cage to get some razor blades.
Cant have it both ways, discipline children before we have to pay cops to do it because we were cowards.
I can only say based on my experience. They tried to convince us there was curfew we were 17 out late walking to get food. 5 cop cars came from all directions and they proceeded to interrogate us (no physical activity). In the end they squished 5 of us in a car (2 ran immediately) and took us home. The cop we rode with us playing techno and definitely had subs. Apologized for his boss being mean and explained some kids were vandalizing property with their car and he knew it wasn’t us. The 2 of us that ran got caught a few hours later and put in overnight jail. They were fined for the cop who fell chasing them and broke some of his equipment.
The only other interaction pre cell phone I had with cops was around the same time. We hit a red light and played a game I dare not say the name as today’s society would not like it, but we all got out of the car and switched spots. We drove for about 5 more minutes and were pulled over by 2 cars. They took us a side and asked us each questions separately. Turns out when we got out of the car a can fell out of one of the doors. They threatened us with an 80 dollar fine or we could go back and pick it up. When we went back they had a car shining a spot light on the can for us to pick up. I still find it funny today how epic they were about this even though it was an obvious accident. Wish they took people who did it on purpose more seriously like this.
In the 1970s Midwest, the police station was a 2-story building. There were some security cameras in the station, but there were no cameras on the elevator. Every so often, they’d take suspects on a “special elevator ride,” where the elevator conveniently got stuck between floors.
They had a phrase for it that I remember my mom using phone book treatment which meant they just to hit you with the phone book which if you don’t know what a phone book is is what they used to be publishing all the phone numbers in your town about 400 Pages floppy sort of the rule of thumb for police brutality
Go look up the Rodney King beating. That was back when they thought they were unaccountable.
I started my career in 1968. This was a large (500 officers) county department. Yes, I was aware of “incidents”. Part of this was due to the lack of training and the lack of “tools”.
We had no pepper-spray, no tasers…. It was unarmed combat or nightstick or gun. That was the “continuum of force”.
So, I saw resisting suspects beaten rather badly because officers did not have the tools to take them into custody without a level of violence. We were not issued nightsticks… We were told that we should buy one and “learn how to use it”. There was no policy on such use, nor was there any training. The normal method of employ was to hit the suspect repeatedly in the head. This would usually result in a number of bloody cuts, but if the fellow was drunk or on drugs, they often would continue to fight.
I was aware of several “in custody” incidents… The police-run holdover was fairly notorious. If a suspect was unruly or wouldn’t stop yelling and screaming, they’d use the fire hose on them. We had one incident where detectives brought a suspect out of the holdover to interrogate. They beat him with a pipe, then took him back to the holdover. The officer running the booking desk was not going to be responsible for this, and called the administrators.
The detectives involved had been extremely stupid and left the bloody pipe in the interrogation room. They were both arrested and charged with felony assault and fired.
That was about the time that the “culture” of that department began to change….
I recall watching the Rodney King footage…. And what struck me at the time was this…. This was during the early history of the AIDS crisis. The officers didn’t want to put their hands on King. So they just kept beating him and demanding that he comply… And at that point he was quite beyond any sort of “compliance”>
I’d take a beating over having my record fucked up or going on probation any day.
Lots of people getting the shit beat out of them by the cops, and when it came down to the cops word or the person that was arrested, they always sided with the cops.
You took your hits and that was it.
It was often far worse. I remember a case back in the 60s where the Philadelphia police strip search about 200 black people in the middle of the street. Frank Rizzo was a monster.
On the other hand, occasionally cops would be making one way trips into swamps, and would never bee seen again.