Police Use Excessive Force and Kill Homeless Man (WARNING: Graphic Content/Videos)

SeaBreeze

SeaBreeze

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They were talking about this on a radio show last night, how although many policemen follow/enforce the laws and are peacekeepers, more and more instances in America are occurring where they abuse their power and use excessive force.

These cops in particular were filmed beating a homeless man, until he was dead. They were not found guilty. Please do not read any further if you are offended by foul language, and violence, one video is of the person on the night of the incident. I wasn't able to watch the whole thing, due to my time restrictions. I do find it upsetting that this is still happening in America.

Another thing that's upsetting, is why this did not get any news coverage on the TV reports or main stream media...I know my eyes were glazing over hearing about Zimmerman day in and day out. :rolleyes:

WARNING: DO NOT GO ANY FURTHER IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY ROUGH LANGUAGE, GRAPHIC PHOTOS OR EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE!
“Agree To Disagree” host Brian Engelman comments upon his disgust with the “not guilty” verdict of former Fullerton, CA police officers Jay Cicinelli, & Manuel Ramos.
This is one of the most disgusting & horrible videos Brian has ever seen.
Why are some police officers so quick to jump to an unnecessary escalation of force?

Brian believes that the former Fullerton, CA police officers should have been convicted for the murder of Kelly Thomas.
Do you “Agree Or Disagree”?

His name,…was Kelly Thomas.

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Watch the full Kelly Thomas murder video right here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv8M6OOM0w4&feature=player_embedded


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IntxCA3sA&feature=player_embedded

 

Disgusting that they would do it and disgusting that they got away with it. Not the first time and won't be the last. Was hoping they would be convicted but that's just a dream. These are not police officers protecting and serving. These are PIGS!
 
Well that was harrowing to say the least.

Verdict, don't know enough and not my call. First thoughts, the cop, Ramos, swinging the night stick sure looked the aggressor to me. The seemingly over reactive and premature laying into him with the sticks confirmed it. The amount of fight in the victim amazed me. Was he on meth? Sheer terror alone couldn't have kept him going hard enough to need 6 burly heroes to pile on top of him to the point of suffocation to subdue him surely? Things got really complicated really fast didn't they?

Did they set out to murder him? Probably not. I suspect a bit of severe bullying was on the mind of Ramos in particular. He seemed to be looking for an ego booster and thought he'd found an easy mark. But that's just an opinion formed from a very bad video. So if he was charged with murder one, probably not guilty, but manslaughter? As instigator of a '**cking up" gone wrong? Ooooo yeah!

The rest of them got into it because that's the culture of what you do. It all escalated so fast I doubt many of them would have known what the hell was going on at the time. What astounds me is that 6 couldn't subdue that pathetic man. But...on meths??? dunno.

This isn't happening in the US alone, we've had some very dodgy stuff handed out by cops here too. Whether tasering a young tourist to death because he was off his face on something he'd ingested in a bar was murder, brutallity, or just total inept stupidity by young cops who hadn't been trained properly in use of tasers is still under discussion. But you can bet they'll come out shiny and squeaky and the kid will be the bad guy.

We get a lot meths affected psychos turning up in hospitals every night too. Bigger people than Kelly, and it's usually the medical personal who get injured. The cops seem able to get them into ER without pulverising them first.

There are others incidents of bashings in custody here that were equally horrendous as that, and some as fatal, and cops as stupid as Ramos for doing it in range of a camera, but.... for every one of them, there are other cops out there who are doing the right thing the right way.
But that's here and this video is there, and maybe things are a lot worse than we hear about.

An item on the early news has just announced that the shooting of a man in the chest by a police officer 2012 was considered not only legal, but a brave act.
I agree. The man was totally psychotic. Had been in a high speed 175kph! car chase through suburbia, fled into a shopping mall and was carrying, and threatening people with a very large knife. He made a frontal attack on the cop and the cop shot him. So who's the bad guy? The quack who was under the illusion that the man would take his meds as prescribed perhaps?

Is it coincidence that so many 'non criminal' violent incidents have increased since mental health care has been changed to allow potential nutters to blend into society on medications that they often don't take? Are people getting 'badder' or are there simply more potential badduns being turned loose to save a few bucks off the health budget instead of being institutionalized as they once were?

Is liberating the mentally ill from the much loathed institutions a more humanitarian solution though? Is better to have them living like stray dogs, homeless, and forgotten? Better that they get shot by cops, and murdered by thrill seeking kids and other fellow psychos?

Jury's out on that too.
 

I think this is a clear case of police brutality on the part of Officer Ramos. He deliberately escalated the situation to the point that this man was beaten to death. I do not know what evidence was presented in court that resulted in the officer not being found guilty. I did not see any behavior initially on the part of Kelly Thomas that indicated that he was on meth. I would like to know what the results of the drug test, which I am sure was preformed by the hospital, discovered. I watched the entire video and what I saw was a disturbed homeless man attempting to cooperate with the police. I think at the point he appeared to be resisting he was simply trying to breath and fighting for his life. I am not sure that at the point he started resisting that I would not have done the same thing. This was overkill, literally.
 
I think we can expect to see more of this in the future. Police are now being trained in military fashion and given military equipment to do their jobs. Couple this type of training with a highly stressful, adversarial job, and you have a recipe for brutality.
 
They showed the victim had no drugs in his system at the time, and he was mentally ill and had a troubled past which included drug abuse. There were 6 cops involved, and I find it very strange that they did not just handcuff this man and take him in. Of course, he had done nothing wrong to be arrested for, and the cops just needed to bully an easy target that day, and it was him.

Immediately afterwards, the cops started confiscating cameras of anyone who was filming this. It does not appear to me that this homeless man was a threat at all to those big officers, why did they have to harass him, and why didn't they just cuff him? While there are good cops out there, the numbers are declining IMO. Also, they are above the law, they'll lie for each other, and the police department/government will do everything they need to to assist them in getting away with their crimes, which go beyond assault and murder.

I understand they are being guided in their actions by the military and homeland security, unfortunately it appears that the American citizens are the targets, not the real criminals and "terrorists". I think it's important for people to be aware that things like this are happening, because they won't get excessive coverage about them on the news. Those topics reported are cherry-picked, and skewed to suit the opinions of the government controlled media.

Some of us here, as already noted, know about these things already and are aware of the reality of what's going on behind the scenes...but others rely only on what FOX and NBC report to them, and form the opinion that the announcer leads them to form. Here's more information on the case...

http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/kelly-thomas/
 
I'm sure we all have our stories of unpleasant encounters with worthless cops. Unfortunately, I have many. Now, this is hardly a case of brutality but a perfect example of a power mad dolt at work. I was home on leave for Christmas in 1967. Had enjoyed watching surf movies at a high school surfing buddy's house and was walking home alone in the late evening. Suddenly, cop car pulls into my path cutting me off. Now, this was in a very affluent neighborhood and the guy gets out and starts barking at me demanding my id, interrogating as to where I was coming from and where I was going and why, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here I was a nice kid serving our country and this jerk treated me as a common criminal. No wonder people hate the police.
 
I like how they immediately blame meth for his behavior. I'll say this - if I had a group of guys playing Dog Pile On The Rabbit with me I'd be fighting like a banshee too.
 
We've entered this territory before and I know many of you have loved ones and friends in law enforcement and they do a fine job. I certainly wouldn't want to deal with the scum they encounter on a daily basis and perhaps they might provide some insight as to why there are bad cops. One might blame the pressure, the environment, psychological unsuitability or a myriad of reasons. Yet, the fact remains there have been and always will be people given power who abuse it. A corrupt justice system adds to that immensely.

Steven King's "Under the Dome" came up in a thread on reading books and I feel it's a perfect example of societal collapse with law enforcement in the hands of the worst of us. One of my favorite scenes in the "THX1138" is of the huge robot cops beating people mercilessly while repeating, "We're here to help you."

So on and on it goes. What was that thread about the Messiah returning. We're waiting. Patiently waiting . . .
 
Lol, Charlie Sheen is something else!

As for the police...I used to respect them and still do for the most part but there are unfortunately too many like this guy on the video.

Did you see at the beginning of the video how he was twirling his baton...he was already itching to do something.
 
It was 1970 and there were demonstrations on my college campus against the war. I was carrying a stiff schedule that semester classes from 8-2:30 then 3 pm to 11 shift in the hospital emergency room. I was unaware that evening that the demonstrations had escalated, and the Governor had declared a curfew. When I got off a friend drove me back to school. It was about 11:30 and he let me out at the corner below my dorm. There was 6-8 students around on that corner which wasn't all that unusual. As I went to step up on the curve suddenly there was yelling and screaming. A group of about 20 people armed came running at us. There were sounds of explosions all around me. My eyes were burning and I couldn't breath, and then I was grabbed. At this point I was hurting scared and very angry. I started fighting, cussing, biting, kicking and punching. I didn't even weigh a 100 lbs. but I inflicted damage. It was only later that I realized they were trying to help me. At the time I wasn't capable of rational thought. All I knew is I was being attacked and I fought back with everything I had. My point is no one really knows how they will respond until it happens to them. This young man was mentally disturbed, and the fact that he was calling for his dad over and over should have been a clue to all the police officers.

This was a horrible incident, and should have never happened. I realize that this type of thing, maybe not as terrible, happens on a daily basis around the country. However, we should remember that there are 1000's of police officers that put their life on the line for us everyday. We rarely hear about them and and the job they do. It is not considered news worthy.

There are abuses daily around the country and the world in every occupation. But there is also a larger number doing what is right. We have all experienced those people too. It just doesn't stick in our mind the way something like this does. And rarely do we see it reported on the news.

A friend's son is a police officer in the UK. He took a leave of absence from his job, because he said that seeing on a daily basis the truly terrible things people did to each other was changing who he was. He told his mother he was losing the ability to remember there were still good people in the world. He later went back and is still a police officer there. However, doing that cost him a promotion. We don't really understand how these type of jobs are affecting the people preforming them.`We need to be putting money into the research in this area. We need to be teaching compassion and understanding of differences to our children starting in kindergarten. Unfortunately when money gets tight these are the first things cut, and maybe just maybe they are some of the most important.
 
That's quite a story Judi, and it's regrettable that it happened, but at least now you know how you'll respond in a similar scenario.

You're right of course that the majority of police are decent, as always it's the bad guys that get talked-up in the media.
 
BadCopNoDonut.jpg
 
LOL That Guy...no donuts really hits below the belt. :p
 

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