Cityscape

Stephen Henderson: Police Beatings Are 'Enraging'

March 29, 2015, 11:00 AM

Videotaped police beatings of unarmed black men leave Stephen Henderson tired and enraged, as he writes in a Free Press column provoked by a new example from Inkster that he calls an attack.

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"How many cops are actually the criminals?" Stephen Henderson wonders in a strongly worded column.

"I've had it with these incidents, with the excuses that come from police departments after them, and the continuing denials, in some quarters, that there's a systemic problem," the Free Press editorial page editor writes in an impassioned Sunday column:

It's hard to tell anymore who we should trust and who we should fear. How many cops are actually the criminals? And how can we have peace, or civility, when those charged with protecting it are the violators? . . .

These incidents are supposedly being committed by "rogue" officers, but the consistency with which they are happening suggests more commonality, and internal acceptance.
That's beyond dangerous. . . .

Police departments are obviously not enforcing policies that are already on the books to prevent their officers from behaving like overseers whose job it is to compel submission rather than provide protection.

It's pretty obvious there's a fundamental breakdown in the covenant between authority and the citizenry.

Addressing an Inkster police video from an African American driver's January arrest, Henderson adds:

For 57-year-old auto worker Floyd Dent, what difference did it make that the two men who beat him were police? They might just as well have been drug dealers or thieves or any other kind of criminal. Dent did nothing to provoke the attack. Didn't even appear to be resisting arrest. . . .

This brutal beating stokes concerns about how African Americans are policed, not just here but nationwide.

-- Alan Stamm


Read more:  Detroit Free Press


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