As I said before, the cop is going to be hung out to dry. Guilty or not. Too bad we didn't see ALL of what actually happened instead of just the last few seconds. If we had, maybe we might have a very different opinion about it.
Someone said, "What if that was your kid the cop hit?" Well, I'm a mom, and when it comes to my kids, I'm a mother bear. Someone hurts my kids, I'm all over them. But I'm also the mom of a cop. Anybody hits him, spits on him, tries to run him down with their car, tries to stab him with a dirty needle, or tries to lure him into a trap so they can murder him (all of which have already happened to him), and I'm a mother bear to him also.
It's really too bad we have to live in a world where not everyone is nice. Not everyone allows us to treat them nicely. Not everyone allows us to treat them the way we would like to be treated. My son is a trained professional. So am I. I've worked in hospital units for years with many of my patients being psychotic due to many variables in their lives. Many of them look so disarmingly mild and harmless. Many smile when I enter their space. Many of them have attacked me without provocation when I am just trying to do my job.
One patient in particular will always stand out in my mind, because I still have the nightmares of that encounter. He was not a particularly large man, supposedly in full restraints, and supposedly sedated. Yet as soon as I was within reach, he grabbed me with intent to inflict serious bodily harm. I had to fight him off alone. I hate to think what would have happened had there been a camera recording just the last few seconds of THAT fight. As it was, I didn't even report the incident as I was afraid someone would say I had been negligent, or over reactive when in truth I was neither. I was just trying to do my job. Maybe the fact that I'm a very small-boned and fragile woman might have helped.
Yes, we need to get rid of the bad cops. But all cops are human. All health care workers are human. All the people the cops deal with are human. All my patients are human. Human interaction will never be as ideally perfect as we'd all like it to be. We aren't a society of robots who are guaranteed to have predictable behaviors, or of trained dogs who will always react exactly as expected. I'll take a cop with a brain, heart, and emotions over a robot any day. Most of them, like my son, are the finest people you'd ever care to meet. They deserve more respect than they get.
Susan