Four friends – young men – walking home, cross a street that is blocked off (i.e., there was no chance of traffic on the street). Austin Police decided this was a situation that demanded their attention:
“We were walking across the street, the sign said ‘do not walk,’ but lights were already turning yellow and streets were blocked off, so we kept walking,” Ramiro says.
“[Police] flashed their flashlights at us, asked us to show them our IDs. Matt and Jeremy said to f— off,” noting that the street was barricaded so the ‘crime’ of Jaywalking was a moot point when cars are unable to drive down the street.
Guess Matt and Jeremy said the “wrong thing” to the “authorities” because the next thing you know this happened:
By the way, this is the same police department where four officers assaulted a female jogger for “jogging against against the light” last year. Video of that assault went viral. At the time, this was the response of the Austin Police Chief to that arrest:
“This person absolutely took something that was as simple as ‘Austin Police – Stop!’ and decided to do everything you see on that video,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a press conference Friday, according to Austin NPR station 90.5 KUT. “And quite frankly she wasn’t charged with resisting. She’s lucky I wasn’t the arresting officer, because I wouldn’t have been as generous. … In other cities there’s cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas,” Acevedo said.
Yeah, she could have been raped by other police, so she should consider herself lucky. That’s the ticket.
So, a bunch of public servants decided to teach these jaywalking fools a lesson they would never forget. Comply or – well, who knows how far it could go these days?
After all, a Pennsylvania cop was just found not guilty on murder charges after shooting a 57 year old man to death while he lay face down on the ground after she had tasered him numerous times. By the way, that video of the man being shot to death is fairly graphic, so a trigger warning to anyone who has been a past victim of violence by police or anyone else.
And then there is this incident of a female student being assaulted and arrested for trespass while in class, even though she showed the police her student id, because she smoked a cigarette outside the building beforehand:
The events leading to her Dec. 7 arrest began when Pazera was smoking a cigarette outside the building during a break. According to the lawsuit, she was given a verbal warning regarding the college’s smoke-free policy and asked to show her campus identification. Pazera told the officer she accepted the warning and returned to class.
According to the suit, two officers followed Pazera into the classroom. When asked if Pazera was his student, Pazera’s teacher cited federal law and refused to give her name.
Pazera then showed her ID to the officers with her thumb covering everything but her picture, the ID’s expiration date and the COD logo, the lawsuit says. The officers then accosted Pazera, according to the lawsuit.
According to court records, Pazera eventually was charged with misdemeanor counts of obstructing a peace officer and resisting a peace officer. Those charges were dropped Oct. 27, the day her case was to go to trial in DuPage County.
Pazera said she sustained several “recurring injuries” to her wrist and shoulder during the altercation and the lawsuit alleges one of the officers used a stun gun to threaten a witness who recorded the scene to surrender his phone.
But at least the deputies who tasered Matthew Ajibade to death in a jail cell will be doing time. Thirty days in jail, served on the weekend, but hey, baby steps, right?
Former deputy Jason Kenny was sentenced to one month in jail, with time to be served at weekends, on a conviction of cruelty to an inmate, along with three years probation, court officials said.
Former deputy Maxine Evans was sentenced to six years probation on public records fraud and three counts of perjury for providing false grand jury testimony.
Both were found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter last month in the death of Matthew Ajibade, 21, who a coroner said died of blunt force trauma in what he ruled was a homicide. […]
Ajibade, an artist and a computer science student, was tasered multiple times while strapped in a restraint chair, according to court testimony.
Jail house security video of the event showed him screaming, clothed only in his underwear and tased in his groin area.
The lesson from all this folks? Avoid encounters with police at all times. And if you can’t? Pray you catch those cops on a good day, one where they aren’t on the prowl for a little “exercise of their authority” at your expense.
