A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport.
The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport’s Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog.
Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.
Context is everything. Police officers are police officers but they’re also humans and they get stressed and do things that they wouldn’t do if they were thinking clearly. For all we know this guy might otherwise be an upstanding officer who immediately regret what he did.
It’s the UK, not the US. They don’t just let all the police walk around with guns. This guy’s a firearms officer and if they’re called to an incident at an airport then something pretty serious is kicking off.
If you got really stressed at work and made a split second decision that you immediately knew was a bad idea you’d want people to know the context.
I’m not defending kicking the guy in the head, I’m just wondering what it takes for someone to get to that point where they think that’s a good idea.