“Hey look at this video that just got posted, it’s going to go viral I bet”
A buddy handed me his phone and I watched a video that was taken on the second floor of my buddy’s apartment, just a few doors down from his unit. In the video, a couple of Tuscaloosa police officers tase and baton a couple of students lying on the ground with their hands up.
While I’m accustomed to the occasional heavy handed tactics of the local cops here in Tuscaloosa— like pepper-spraying football players at an off-campus party, or conducting massive drug rads on marijuana-smoking students— it’s not all that often that students are being attacked by the cops. It’s very common to get frivolous tickets, like the $200 ticket I got one time for drinking a single beer in front of my own apartment. (Open container tickets are $200 in tuscaloosa, but driving while texting = $25 fine. Classic Bama logic for you).
Sure enough, as my friend predicted, the clip went viral. As it spread through the local snapchat/yik yak social media, it also hit fraternity websites and local news. Multiple videos were taken and posted, and it hit front-page of reddit the next day.
I emailed the mayor and expressed concern that accountability exists for students, but not cops. He actually emailed me back and said the city would look into it, etc etc. The cops are on paid leave. To me, it looks like a strategy to satiate public demand and wait for things to blow over. They probably figured after a couple of news cycles the issue would die, but it still remains to be seen what will happen to the officers in the video. A few of them have been suspended with pay, as is often the case. Even though the video is pretty obvious in terms of proving wrongdoing, it always takes days and weeks and months for cities to decide what to do. Meanwhile, Tuscaloosa is likely facing very credible lawsuits. I have yet to see any statement that the city has dropped charges against the students in this video.
We often talk of race and privilege and the like, but only now are a lot of citizens (especially conservatives) realizing that the script is changing. They once felt comfort knowing their whiteness would protect them from police terrorism. Police terrorism is something we sanction in America as a weapon against the poor and against minorities. Mayor Walt Maddox released a statement saying “parents can feel safe about their students” who are in Tuscaloosa. That could be read as “don’t worry, our cops know to not target white , middle-class citizens.”
As these students learned, however, cops don’t always play by class rules. American policing has become so unhinged, it doesn’t even play by the rules of oppression that we are familiar with. Even young, white, well-off white students can get tased and beaten for a noise complaint (which is punishable with a ticket, presumably for more than $25).
Perhaps now White America will look at the sheer amount of police violence in this country and acknowledge a need for change.