Remember back when a citizen armed with one of those bulky camcorder things that were so fancy back in the early 90s caught LAPD officers beating the crap out of Rodney King, and it was such a big deal to see something like that at the time that citizens took to the streets and rioted and basically almost burned down the whole town? Now granted, their was a huge racial component to the King beating that sparked those riots, but I really believe that a secondary component of the rage it incited was simply from the fact that people were seeing something they’d heard about happening but had rarely seen, and it shocked them to their core. But now police brutality videos have, sadly, become sort of commonplace on the web, what with just about every phone having video capabilities and endless options for uploading video to the web — one seems to pop up every few weeks — and I think that we’ve collectively become a little desensitized to them.
With that said, this video of a Phoenix, Arizona police officer brutally body checking a 15 year-old girl to the concrete, unprovoked, is just plain stomach-turning. As seen in the first portion of it, the girl had been fighting with her mother, literally, and was walking away after having the fight broken up when the cop just runs over and body checks the bloody hell out of her. The department has suspended the officer, Patrick Larrison, and launched an investigation into the incident.
Also, how the hell did Arizona suddenly become the worst place on earth? I’m still baffled by this. That state went from being a sort of sleepy, picturesque haven for golfing and partying and now suddenly it’s more ass-backwards than Florida, West Virginia and South Carolina combined. Get your sh*t together, Arizona!
(Pic via)