Excessive force? Or the bastard deserved it?

[McNutty]

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I've seen it. Still think 2 officers could have handled the situation better than resorting to head punches. A baton chokehold for a few seconds is likely less barbaric, and as long as there isn't great tissue damage, less injurous.

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First of all, choking someone with a baton even for a short time could easily cause very permanant damage or death.

Second, in roughly seven years as a cop I believe I have punched 6 people in the face when on the ground. 1 was very close to biting me in the neck (and coincidently was handcuffed in front at the time). 1 was an absolute monster on PCP. 4 were reaching for their waistband areas. Of those 4, two ended up having drugs that they were likely to have been trying to discard, 1 did not have anything of anykind, and 1 had a nice little .25 auto in his pocket.

Now if you had taken a videotape of these last two incidents, you would have seen me react exactly the same and yet one would have seemed barbaric after I failed to recover anything and 1 would have seem justified when i pulled out the gun that the [censored] was going to try to kill me with. What's the difference, Nothing. When I am in a confrontation i don't know what they have and I don't knnow why they are resisting. I try to use the force likely to overcome resistance. I try to not use more force than I need to but sometimes you don't have the luxury of comtemplating all the angles and weighing the best course of action. In fact, most of the time you have fractions of a second. I do know this. If you don't want to run the risk of getting hit, don't resist. I can't seem to ever recall anyone getting hurt who listened when I said, "you're under arrest. put your hands behind your back. " Furthermore, every time I get into a physical confrontation with someone there is a gun involved. Yeah its my gun but its mine in so long as I can keep it. I (every cop out there) can't ever afford to lose a fight. Not once, because if I do then it might be the time when the "my" gun becomes "their" gun. So, i try to avoid getting in situations where anyone gets close to that point by using the force that I feel I need to. I could probably use less force in a lot of situations like the time when the guy turned out not to have anything. But what if I had tried something else less violent the time when the guy was reaching for a gun I didnt know he had. Maybe i still would have won but maybe I wouldn't. I'm sorry, i don't get paid to die and I'm not ever going to risk it.

Now, i havent really seen much of the video and I probably wont because while people think that video doesn't lie it doesn't always tell the whole truth. So much depends on editing, context, and things the camera view doesn't see. Now it maybe true that this is clear cut excessive force but it may not and I don't think I will feel comfortable judging another cop by that video. So for Mr. ItalianFX, seriously, get some time on the street before you start making judgements on use of force situations you weren't at. Not everything works like in the academy. There's a quote from a book on policework by the guy who wrote The Wire. It goes, "Police Brutality, [censored] that. Police Work has always been brutal," Sending bad people to jail who do not want to go is not clean or easy, its messy and often violent. And people who don't want to acknowledge will never understand the job.