To Serve & Protect: The Other Animals with Guns

The blogosphere and national news outlets are all abuzz about the latest news of cops gone wild on the citizenry. I heard audio of the Ryan Moats police incident on Thursday night on Fox Sports Radio. In another case of law enforcement abuse of a law abiding citizen, Houston Texans RB Ryan Moats received an urgent message that his mother-in-law lay dying of breast cancer in a Dallas, TX hospital. Moats and his family went through a red light with his hazard lights on, and was chased by a Dallas cop all the way to the hospital, which is understandable. At that point, the officer was doing his job. However, what is inhuman is that when the cop stopped him in the hospital parking lot, and Moats explained that his mother-in-law was dying and that's why he raced to the scene, the cop still didn't let him go and insisted on pulling his gun, pointing it at Moats and his wife, and browbeating them. It was 15 minutes before the officer finished the ticketing and questioning process, despite a nurse coming to the parking lot and informing the officer that Moats' mother-in-law indeed was dying. By the time he finished, Moats' mother-in-law had died.

Frankly, I'm surprised that the cop (Robert Powell) with his bad-@$$ cowboy attitude didn't shoot Moats, because it's probably what he wanted to do. Why else would you draw a gun on someone in a hospital parking lot while he's explaining to you his family emergency?! Powell's exact words were, "I can screw you over!" (See pictures above). To make matters worse, Powell told Moats that if he didn't produce his insurance and registration, he would have his car towed. The arrogance!

Powell deserves to be fired and to have the pants sued off his sorry (racist) behind. Having friends in law enforcement, I empathize with the nature of their jobs. They do tough, thankless work, just as our military does, and they do it with low pay and at risk of death on a daily basis. There are many good cops out there who embody service to our community because I was influenced by many of them in my community while growing up. But there are also way too many cowboy cops and loose cannons who are allowed by our police and sheriff departments to terrorize the population. Police abuse is the norm in the United States, not an aberration, especially for Blacks, Latinos, etc.

Police brutality in the United States is unacceptable, although in my home country of Haiti, police brutality is accepted and even encouraged by law enforcement and we are just as likely to be kidnapped or killed by our own cops due to corruption from the top down. There are other places where police brutality is actually worse: Jamaica, Brazil, France, and quite a few countries of the world are worse than the US in terms of civilians killed by cops per 10,000, etc. At least it's a little bit better here from a human rights and civil rights perspective. Despite racial profiling in the US, I usually don't walk down the street wondering if the cop I see is working for a drug lord or not. Of course that's not to say that any level of police brutality is acceptable because it's not. I'm just making a comparison.

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