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Police Brutality Case Reads Like Book of Wrongs
Linn Washington Jr.
The July 2013 Philadelphia police attack on Sharif Anderson, where officers beat, kicked and shot Anderson twice with a Taser is more than just another ugly incident of abuse by a big city police force long assailed for its persistent brutality and corruption.
That police assault on Anderson provides a chilling case study of so much that is wrong within the criminal justice system in Philadelphia and too many places across America. This ‘wrong’ extends from police officers to police commanders through prosecutors.
“I was in disbelief,” Sharif Anderson said about the police attack that occurred when officers rushed him while he was using his smart phone to video other police roughing-up some of his colleagues.
Incredibly, the ‘crime’ of videoing police that triggered the attack on and arrest of Anderson is not really a crime in Philadelphia. The city’s police commissioner had issued directives in 2011 and in 2012 telling officers that citizens had a right to video police – directives apparently disregarded by the officers involved in Anderson’s arrest.
Given the fact that the police commissioner had barred arrests of citizens for photographing and/or videoing police, some observers contend Philadelphia prosecutors should have rejected the police arrests of Anderson and four others from that 2013 incident because those arrests arose from violations of the Commissioner’s directives. But prosecutors accepted police claims that disorderly conduct not videoing precipitated the arrest of Anderson.
“I was assaulted and they charge me with assault,” Anderson recounted. “A cop claimed I bruised his hand in the midst of him pummeling me.”
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Source: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2772
