In video of the April 18 encounter, Frank Tyson can be seen lying motionless on the floor of a bar for more than 5 minutes before police check him for a pulse.
The Canton Police Department in Ohio has released body camera video from the night a 53-year-old man died after he repeatedly told officers “I can’t breathe” as he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back and he was pinned to the ground.
In video of the encounter on April 18, the man, Frank Tyson, can be seen lying motionless on the floor of a bar for more than 5 minutes before police check him for a pulse and about 8 minutes before CPR is started.
In the nearly 36-minute video, police respond to the scene of a single-car crash to find a downed power pole and an unoccupied vehicle with the driver’s side door open and an airbag deployed.
It’s because they don’t see them as people, they see them as violent criminals that the world would be better off without.
If you step into their shoes for a minute, and one of the criminals you just successfully took off of the streets said they can’t breathe, your first thought might be “good. Maybe that’ll teach you a lesson about doing crimes in my neighborhood.” Your second might be “I wish I could shoot you right now and get this over with, but maybe I’ll get lucky and I can say I didn’t hear you.”
Note that the second one is inherently a stupid thought, there’s body cams. That kind of logic didn’t stop my 5-year-old from telling me she cleaned her room when I could easily check and find out she didn’t, and it won’t stop cops from fantasizing about everything working out here.
That’s exactly why they do things that way. They’re living out a fantasy world where there are no real rules and there are no consequences, and they have to live a balancing act between indulging in that and dealing with reality. Sometimes cops fail to balance that, and that’s what we see here.
As for who trains them, it’s their fellow cops. This isn’t a bunch of individual fantasies, these men work and train and talk together about how it’d be so much better if they had less restrictions and just talk about that hypothetical world. New cops who have any kind of racism or similar “My group is best” can join the conversation and add in their own unique version to the group fantasy. New cops who aren’t already racist, though, won’t hear blatant racism. No, they will just hear about crime stats and reoffending rates, about cops that died trying to deal with all the supposed crime, and about how stopping them is justice and will help everyone, not just cops. In time they’ll share the group fantasy, too, and stop seeing their victims as people. Occasionally someone just doesn’t join in the fantasy and they get bullied until they quit.
This is why the easiest way to move forward from this kind of thing is to gut the police departments and start over, or we at least need bodycams that can’t be turned off so easily.
Maybe, but it didn’t used to be this way even as recently as the 80s. And it isn’t like this in most other countries (at least the European ones km aware of).
It’s a cultural thing, and training, and it can be fixed, we just have to want to fix it bad enough. No idea what will be the tipping point. George Floyd wasn’t enough, so I’m not sure what if anything will be. Or if we’ll just go deeper I to this police state mentality where everything is an us vs them situation.
Training for police has changed. I don’t have the data but i read that many police are often trained by ex-military who are more skilled at (and therefore focus on) training soldiers to be an occupying force rather than as citizens policing each other