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A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport.
The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport’s Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog.
Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.
I’m from the UK, and I can’t agree. Most likely, at worst, he will be dismissed from the police force. It is very rare for police constables to face criminal charges, and even rarer for those charges to actually stick.
Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man, was reading the newspaper on the London Underground. The metropolitan police shot him in the head seven times. No officer was held accountable.
Ian Tomlinson, a newsagent, was walking home past a protest. The metropolitan police beat him to death. A constable lost his job, but was found not guilty by the court.
A little kid with mental health issues went up to a metropolitan police constable to ask for help. The cop pepper sprayed and beat the child 30 times with a baton. He was dismissed from the police force, but did not face criminal charges.
And you claim that the officer responsible for this is “fucked”? Dream on. At worst he’ll have to get a real job like the rest of us.
The only one of those I’m familiar with is Menenez and the officers genuinely believed he had explosives. It was a fucked up situation and I do think they probably should have suffered more consequences. But honestly there’s room for a little nuance.
British cops are not routinely armed so shooting generally is a LOT rarer.
If I shot someone 7 times in the head, it wouldn’t matter how many people agreed with me that we all thought it was the devil himself crawling out of a portal to hell, I’d get charged and sentenced for manslaughter.
The police are able to get away with literal murder and people will come out of the woodwork, wringing their hands about all of the nuances of the situation.
No, fuck that, and fuck the police. They’re a legalised criminal gang that exists to be the fist of the ruling class and nothing more. If I could click my fingers right now and make the entire institution no longer exist I’d do it faster than you could blink.
But then who would who call if someone broke into your home and didn’t even bother shooting your dog?
He had been incorrectly identified as a terrorist and an imminent threat. The fuck up was not the person who fired the gun but whoever gave him the order.
That’d be Dame Cressida Dick, later promoted to Commissioner of the Met.
Afraid that I have to agree. It’s nowhere near as extreme an example, there was a case brought against the West Midlands Police a few years ago where the cops intimidated a bunch of fans from Bristol, detained them, and forced them back on the train to Bristol. It took four years to settle the case, and the only way they were able to be taken seriously at all was because a serving policeman in Bristol felt inclined to back them, despite warnings not to do so by his peers.
It’s the classic “who polices the police” scenario, and sadly the charges are often so painfully low that it feels like the best way to commit a crime and get away with it is to join the police…
I think I’ve read recently about a serial rapist and murderer convicted in UK who was a policeman.
Our timeline is generally dark, but I simply admire how my instinct, feeling that there’s truth to the rule “all free people bear arms”, which I couldn’t justify in my childhood where it only had strange connection with dignity and fantasy\heroic stuff I would read, is being justified by life itself.
Same with the rule that one can’t build a legal system that is just, only that is competitive, and even in that evil may win so an honest man, or a group of honest people, or a whole oppressed people may have to fight the whole world indirectly. Well, that part I should have understood even back then, I have family in such a place.