Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.
Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. And despite that, each died after police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.
Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.
I watched an execution in Tacoma last summer.
Guy was running from the cops in a truck, flips a bitch, does some light bumper cars off traffic tries to take a corner, right in front of us (standing in a parking lot, just came out of the store), too fast, not buckled and gets thrown out of the truck which careens into a gas station.
Dude is obvs high. Cops pull up, state patrol, non lethal guns out, they’re hiding behind their cars. Dudes sitting in his ass, throws them the finger and tells them to fuck off, rolls like 3 times over and dumps his stash in the storm drain. It’s clear as day what he did.
There’s a girl in the same parking lot screaming, “He’s unarmed!” Over and over and over again.
The local police arrive and they swarm the guy with tasers. We were leaving at that point, I counted 5 cops actively tasing him.
Heart attack. Natural causes according to the police report.
Regardless of the chase, regardless of his indignation, none of that equals lethal force. It’s as if we took all Americas serial killers and put them on payroll.
There is no situation I can imagine where I would call the police. I’ll handle my safety myself, I’m 45min away from the nearest station anyway. There’s no protection they’re offering that is worth the risk they themselves bring to me.
ACAB. Fuck the police. Fuck this entire society, bring the boogaloo. No one would look around and decide this is a society they would create. No one. It’s way past time to stop fighting for it.