Excerpts:

Emmett Brock, 23, a trans man who was driving home from his job as a teacher when he was beaten by an LASD deputy outside of a 7/11.

Brock was sent to the Norwalk station lockup and booked for three felonies [mayhem, resisting arrest and obstruction, plus misdemeanor failure to obey a police officer]. When he told the staff he is a transgender man, he said, they asked to see his genitals before deciding which holding cell to send him to.

Brock is now jobless and still facing criminal charges, all stemming from a traffic stop the deputy said was based on an air freshener he’d spotted hanging from Brock’s rearview mirror.

A few blocks from the school [on his way home from work], Brock spotted a deputy who appeared to be having a heated conversation with a woman on the side of the road. As he drove by, Brock threw up his middle finger. He didn’t even think the deputy would see it, he said. A few seconds later, he spotted a patrol cruiser following close behind him. It made Brock uneasy. He turned down one side street and then another, trying to figure out whether the cruiser was following him or just going in the same direction. The deputy didn’t turn on his lights or siren, but made every turn Brock did.

[After pulling in to a 7/11] Brock stepped out of his car, Deputy Joseph Benza approached and told him: “I just stopped you,” offering no explanation as to why. Confused, Brock replied, “No, you didn’t.” “Yeah, I did,” the deputy said. Then he grabbed Brock’s arm and forced him to the ground.

At one point, the deputy ordered him to put his arms behind his back — but Brock‘s arms were already pinned under his chest. “Even when I did get them out the way he wanted, he continued to punch me,” Brock told The Times. “He just kept saying, ‘Stop resisting, stop resisting.’ I didn’t understand why he was shouting that because I wasn’t resisting.”

When the incident went through the department’s normal force review process, officials cleared Benza of wrongdoing. One sergeant wrote that Brock was assaultive “with threat of serious bodily injury.” Another sergeant, listed as the watch commander, concurred, saying the incident was within policy and the force used was “objectively reasonable.” The sergeant also checked “no” on the paperwork next to the question: “Could officer safety, tactical communication, or de-escalation techniques have been improved?”

The Sheriff’s Department has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for two other use-of-force incidents caught on camera, including one in which a deputy punched a woman in the face while trying to take her child.

    • JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      This is why I preach moving out of the shit hole called America. Needing to be armed isn’t a normal thing. Sorry.

      • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Can’t move; not easily, at least. More than half the ‘civilized’ world rejects disabled emigrés; I’m probably going to die in this shithole.

      • Catfish [she/her]@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Move to where exactly? It’s not like the average person can up and get citizenship in Canada or Europe. Even then those places don’t save you from crooked cops and all of society’s illnesses. Moving away isn’t gonna change anything here either, it’s selfish to just run away instead of fight.

        • cayde6ml@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I used to believe that “running away” is selfish and cowardly, and I still kinda do to an extent. I usually believe in giving it all your might and then some, and going down fighting.

          But you can’t reasonably expect that out of everyone, or to the same extent, and its not entirely selfish to want to be safer, even if there is an argument to be made that if everyone came together to kick capitalist ass would save more lives in the long run than would die in the violence.

          All my life, I’ve always dreamed of being revolutionary fighter, and I always carry that zeal. But as a backup plan, I hope to start learning Chinese soon, so if I’m somehow able to get my family and my lover and I over to the socialist paradise PRC by comparison to the Amerikkkan shithole, I’m jumping on that chance with very little pause, lest it slip from my grasp. I’ll of course stay and fight as long as I can, and I don’t mean to sound complacent or defeatist. But I want my grandparents to enjoy the last years, if not decades of the remaining twilight eras of their lives, and them enjoy and peacefully pass away in a Utopia rather than die screaming, sadly and violently in a turmoil of a conflict in the ass-end of nowhere.

          And my almost-girlfriend means more than almost anything or anyone to me, and I want her to have a good life that she deserves after the abuse and trauma and sadness and loneliness she has been through. If that means I have to resign myself from the Amerikkkan shithole/ the socialist battleground in the belly of the beast, so be it. I can still contribute to communism in other ways.

        • Life2Space@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Not to mention how Americans lack any expertise in foreign languages - hell! The average American isn’t even fully literate in English.

    • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I get the sentiment, but I feel like being armed is so much more likely to get you killed at this current point in time. We don’t have any groups going around who will avenge you right now, unfortunately