Photo via Ivan Radic/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
February 15, 2021, 11:08 am
Three Phoenix police officers were caught on their body cameras lamenting the fact that they let Black Lives Matter protesters leave the area peacefully and didn’t instead “just stomp on them” and “gas them.”
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They can later be heard complaining about the body cams that caught this conversation, saying that they used to be able to go out and brutalize people willy nilly without consequences.
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The recently-published footage was captured last October near the end of a Black Lives Matter protest in which the featured cops had helped to arrest 18 individuals.
“Why didn’t we just stomp on them when they were leaving?” pondered one officer.
Another suggested that the police force should “just gas them and let them run like crazy.”
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Phoenix, Arizona police officers are notoriously terrible, leading the nation in police shootings in 2019 — the same year video went viral of a city cop threatening to shoot a pregnant woman. This was also the same department that created a Trump-themed “challenge coin” to commemorate the time one of their officers shot an anti-Trump protester in the groin.
After whining about missing a chance to do some police brutality, the officers in the newly-released footage complained that required body cameras have “taken the job down the drain.”
“We actually want to do the job like we did 10, 15 years ago, but it’s never going to come back,” says one cop. “If they ever came back and they said, ‘Guys, just f—— kick some f—— a– out there and reduce crime,’ I’d say, ‘Okay.'”
To be clear, random police beatings do not reduce crime.
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“So you won’t be in f—— handcuffs and doing your job?” said another officer in the body cam video. “Going, ‘Oh, let me go watch that body cam video just in case he might have struck somebody.’ I remember back when. It was so much nicer.”
The defense attorneys of the individuals arrested during the October protest in Phoenix obtained this footage and are using it to argue that the police involved were engaging in politically motivated arrests. After one protester shouts at the cops to go home, one of the officer calls them a “f—ing liberal piece of s–t.”
Phoenix also calls Maricopa County its home — the same county that employed former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who shamelessly enforced a racist “papers please” law targeting people whom cops assumed were immigrants. He was convicted of contempt of court for continuing to enforce this after a court filed an injunction ordering him to stop and later pardoned by Donald Trump.
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This new body cam footage suggests that little has improved within the department.
*First Published: February 15, 2021, 11:08 am
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