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14 Police Officers Take Down a One-Legged Homeless Black Man Outside Twitter HQ

87 points by radmuzom 11y ago

davelnewton 11y ago
Obviously my first thought was "Yeah, but we don't know anything about the leg or the militarized prosthetic on the other one.
- sitkack 11y ago
  What if the prosthetic leg had IoT LiPo and SIMD? Freak'n mecha kung fury kicks with TLB page faults!
tired_man 11y ago
Holy crap! It's darned lucky they had so many officers handy! That dude might have turned his crutches into some sort of martial arts weapon and killed hundreds of people! Hell, they could be some advanced flight system that would have let him ram the TransAmerica building and destroy it! If that guy'd had both legs, they would have needed twice as many officers, SWAT, and an armored vehicle. I'm thankful the casualty list was so low. Oh, wait... No casualties? Even better! Thanks, SFPD, for ridding the streets of another deadly terrorist! /utter disgust.
- branchan 11y ago
  Your wildly sarcastic comment genuinely elevated the quality of comments we have here on Hacker News. Thank you.
  - tired_man 11y ago
    Probably, not. I'll work on that.
- sitkack 11y ago
  He is black, has super powers even with a single leg. I understand as Jerry Brown was on holiday in Cambodia.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
MrDosu 11y ago
I don't get it why Americans stand for this. It's not like this is happening to minorities and the masses are just turning a blind eye. When I lived in the US and was in contact with a cop every single time I felt like I was in danger. Even though I did absolutely nothing wrong. And then the cop image is portrayed on TV as the badass sheriff from the 1800s, no wonder these individuals get all hyper ego in an emotional situation. Back home our cops #1 priority is deescalation. This does not just happen. There is training for this, a lot of training how to handle other people. For example if someone is fleeing in a car, let him go. They will catch him later, don't drive that dude in a corner in a high speed vehicle with 10 armed people chasing him down in a manhunt. It only endangers people.
- coldpie 11y ago
  > I don't get it why Americans stand for this. Many of us don't, hence the protests and hundreds of articles that you've been reading. But the truth is most voters don't have encounters the police. People are taught from a very young age that police are the "good guys" keeping the "bad guys" at bay, and so they get whatever protections and defenses they think they need, including immunity from prosecution. But articles like this and the protests over the various recent murders raise awareness that the police are out of control. Change doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen from nothing. These articles are Americans refusing to stand for this, and we need to keep it up.
  - MrDosu 11y ago
    I did not mean to generalize too much, there is plenty of protest in america against this.
- graycat 11y ago
  No, there is a simple explanation: There are some unwritten rules, wildly in conflict with US laws and the US Constitution. In the case of the OP, a relevant rule is, a poor, old, handicapped, black man is not permitted to be on the sidewalks of the high rent business district. In such a case, the police respond as in the OP and its video clip. The sentence for violating the rule is to be pinned down, painfully, insulted, humiliated, have some belongings, e.g., crutches, stolen, and generally treated like dirt. But, with witnesses, smartphone video, and lawyers, the black man may no longer be poor but may get $500,000 from the city of San Francisco. If I were on the jury, he'd win, big time, big enough to make all of SF taxpayers feel the pain. The whole scene was in wild violation of the US Constitution. The police are guilty as sin, of assault and battery, at least. Toss in false arrest. Add in theft of his crutches. And more. He was guilty of what? Self defense against assault and battery? If he died, and maybe his health was so poor he might have, e.g., he might have had a heart condition or high blood pressure which could yield a fatal stroke, then the police would be guilty of murder -- literally murder. And they should be prosecuted for just that. Better not ask me to serve on a jury where that poor guy was the plaintiff -- I'd call for the cops to be treated like wild, mad, rabid dogs, enemies of the citizens, making war on the citizens, sadists. The situation is entirely similar to what the Nazi Brown Shirts did in Hitler's Germany: In that country, some citizens were regarded as unwanted. Then, via the Brown Shirt thugs, those citizens were subject to just whatever, robbery, beatings, murder. Now in SF, some citizens are again regarded as unwanted, and the police act like the Nazi Brown Shirts and rob, beat, and, maybe, murder such citizens. Not much difference. It's inhumanity of man to man, and it's ugly. We've seen the consequences from Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, ISIS, and more. We don't like it. We have our Constitution to help stop it. We don't want it. One really good use of smartphones, their video capabilities, the Internet, social media, and the US legal system is, finally, to stop this ugly stuff. Police: Here's your lesson. Here in the US, that stuff's going to stop. It's going to stop the easy way or the hard way. I have to believe you want the hard way, and it's coming. Net, the power in the US is definitely not in the hands of the police and, instead, is in the hands of the voting citizens. And, each such story, with video, on the Internet creates a lot of votes to stop the ugly stuff, via the hard way if necessary. Cops will be going to jail, for assault and battery, murder, etc., for long terms but likely in prison conditions where they won't last even six months. Blue shirts, you're going to have to stop that Nazi stuff, however much it pains you not to be a thug -- you can't beat the voting citizens with video cameras. Can't happen. All we have to do is quietly, calmly, privately pull a lever in a voting booth, and you and your Nazi behavior are toast.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
It is worth taking a step back and recalling how long the problem of police brutality existed BEFORE it became a hot-button issue. For the longest time, raising such issues would incite accusations that one is either sympathetic to criminals or naively on the track to "Escape from NY" levels of crime. Theodore Roosevelt regretted not having reformed American health care in his time in office. It took this long to get the imperfect ACA. Police brutality as a national issue is no different. Unless there is serious, sustained momentum for change, it simply won't come. This video should be such a reminder.
- tsotha 11y ago
  Police brutality is in the headlines a lot recently because there are factions that benefit from it politically. When that's no longer true it'll drop out of the headlines regardless of what gets done. I hope people who are sympathetic to doing something about it realize this. They don't have an unlimited amount of time to come up with reasonable proposals.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Correct, and fans of the Voting Rights Act should be there as a reminder that "rights" can be hard lost as they are hard won. There is no inevitably in humanity. The best we can expect is reproduction.
snurk 11y ago
I don't see a problem; he was resisting and refused to comply. And he continued to resist and fight even when he was on the ground. The article's main complaint was that the police held him down. There are an endless number of unbalanced and sociopathic people in the U.S. who believe they're entitled to [EDIT: resist] the police, wrestle with them, etc. You're not. And the solution to this so-called police "brutality" is to simply be respectful, stop talking, and follow directions. For sure, perhaps the police could have employed a more clever psychological de-escalation technique. That'd be an interesting training issue to research and borrow from other location that deploy it successfully. But here was a person who was resisting arrest and disobeying instructions.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest? I suspect that even in the US it's not yet technically a crime to choose to be about your lawful business rather than do whatever a police officer tells you when you're not under arrest. There are an endless number of unbalanced and sociopathic people in the U.S. who believe they're entitled to argue with the police There are also an endless number of balanced individuals who are entitled to argue. Everyone is entitled to argue. The police aren't magic. The police aren't gods. The police are (but should not be) above the law. And the solution to this so-called police "brutality" is to simply be respectful, stop talking, and follow directions. And the solution to being raped is to stay at home and never go outside? The solution to getting shot is to hide under your bed twenty four hours a day? Or is crime only acceptable from police officers?
  - snurk 11y ago
    > I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest? Actually, yes, it's called a Terry Stop. Whether he _ended up_ in a squad car and brought to jail isn't the issue.
    - EliRivers 11y ago
      A "Terry Stop" relies on reasonable suspicion. A patdown is permitted to check for weaponry. If this was a Terry Stop, they went so far that they turned it into something else; pinning an unarmed one-legged man to the ground, stamping on his legs, is not a Terry Stop. Reminds me of the bullshit they pull where they pick someone up, mess him around, and then kick him back onto the street whenever they feel like it; because they can say "it wasn't actually an arrest" they get away with it. If this was not a Terry Stop, then it's all just more bullshit from bullyboys in uniform. You see the footage. Seriously, how do you perform the mental gymnastics to defend this blatantly unacceptable activity? They're not heroes. They're out of control bullies wearing uniforms, and the longer we let them get away with this sort of nonsense, the worse it's going to get.
Mz 11y ago
I am homeless. I did not read the entire article because the author really does not know what happened yet assumes the worst about the police. First, as someone who is both homeless and seriously handicapped, I feel the article is offensive and dehumanizing to people like me for its clear assumption that poverty and a handicap makes someone incapable of being a real threat. That is beyond insulting and in no way helps get people like me and our actual problems taken more seriously. Second, although there is plenty of classicism in the world and this does negatively impact my life, I think I am far more aware if its impact in online forums than IRL. Some people IRL make my life unnecessarily harder with their unfounded conclusions about me. More people online seem to dismiss the possibility that I have a brain and something of value to contribute to the conversation and so on. Third, it is not uncommon for local cops to be familiar with local homeless people. A high percentage of people on the street have either medical or mental health issues. Many of them are self medicating with drugs or alcohol. Society as a whole needs to come up with better solutions, but, while waiting for those solutions, cops still need to protect the public from sometimes irrational behaviour. If they know this guy and have a long history with him, sending him to a hospital may be the most humane, compassionate answer available. I was woke up one night by a cop looking for another homeless person who was wanted for violent assault. When I was woke up, it was very aggressive because he was looking for a violent man and prepared for the worst. When he saw who I was, he said "Oh, it's you. I know who you are. You can put your hands down." He then went into social worker mode. I had not interacted directly with the police in that town before but I was recognized and known to be not a troublemaker. The antidote to racism, sexism, classicism etc is to judge individuals as individuals and take things on a case by case basis. This article is very guilty of not doing that. It makes sweeping judgements of both the cops and the individual they sent to a hospital, without knowing enough about what happened to justify those conclusions. There are a great many things wrong with how we deal with homelessness in this country and I know racism, classicism, sexism etc are very real and do serious harm to people. But I don't see this article helping in any way to solve that problem.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Thank you for explaining very clearly what is wrong with the judgements passed in that article. The entire thing felt wrong in a way i could not articulate, but you managed to articulate it in an amazingly lucid manner. :)
redml 11y ago
A guy resisting arrest makes front page on hacker news because its near twitter HQ? Seriously?
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  It's got a lot better, but in years past we've had stories make front page because someone got shot near Facebook, and a serious car accident near Twitter HQ.

87 points by radmuzom 11y ago

Obviously my first thought was "Yeah, but we don't know anything about the leg or the militarized prosthetic on the other one.

sitkack 11y ago
What if the prosthetic leg had IoT LiPo and SIMD? Freak'n mecha kung fury kicks with TLB page faults!

tired_man 11y ago

Holy crap! It's darned lucky they had so many officers handy! That dude might have turned his crutches into some sort of martial arts weapon and killed hundreds of people! Hell, they could be some advanced flight system that would have let him ram the TransAmerica building and destroy it! If that guy'd had both legs, they would have needed twice as many officers, SWAT, and an armored vehicle. I'm thankful the casualty list was so low. Oh, wait... No casualties? Even better! Thanks, SFPD, for ridding the streets of another deadly terrorist! /utter disgust.

branchan 11y ago
Your wildly sarcastic comment genuinely elevated the quality of comments we have here on Hacker News. Thank you.
- tired_man 11y ago
  Probably, not. I'll work on that.
sitkack 11y ago
He is black, has super powers even with a single leg. I understand as Jerry Brown was on holiday in Cambodia.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

MrDosu 11y ago

I don't get it why Americans stand for this. It's not like this is happening to minorities and the masses are just turning a blind eye. When I lived in the US and was in contact with a cop every single time I felt like I was in danger. Even though I did absolutely nothing wrong. And then the cop image is portrayed on TV as the badass sheriff from the 1800s, no wonder these individuals get all hyper ego in an emotional situation. Back home our cops #1 priority is deescalation. This does not just happen. There is training for this, a lot of training how to handle other people. For example if someone is fleeing in a car, let him go. They will catch him later, don't drive that dude in a corner in a high speed vehicle with 10 armed people chasing him down in a manhunt. It only endangers people.

coldpie 11y ago
> I don't get it why Americans stand for this. Many of us don't, hence the protests and hundreds of articles that you've been reading. But the truth is most voters don't have encounters the police. People are taught from a very young age that police are the "good guys" keeping the "bad guys" at bay, and so they get whatever protections and defenses they think they need, including immunity from prosecution. But articles like this and the protests over the various recent murders raise awareness that the police are out of control. Change doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen from nothing. These articles are Americans refusing to stand for this, and we need to keep it up.
- MrDosu 11y ago
  I did not mean to generalize too much, there is plenty of protest in america against this.
graycat 11y ago
No, there is a simple explanation: There are some unwritten rules, wildly in conflict with US laws and the US Constitution. In the case of the OP, a relevant rule is, a poor, old, handicapped, black man is not permitted to be on the sidewalks of the high rent business district. In such a case, the police respond as in the OP and its video clip. The sentence for violating the rule is to be pinned down, painfully, insulted, humiliated, have some belongings, e.g., crutches, stolen, and generally treated like dirt. But, with witnesses, smartphone video, and lawyers, the black man may no longer be poor but may get $500,000 from the city of San Francisco. If I were on the jury, he'd win, big time, big enough to make all of SF taxpayers feel the pain. The whole scene was in wild violation of the US Constitution. The police are guilty as sin, of assault and battery, at least. Toss in false arrest. Add in theft of his crutches. And more. He was guilty of what? Self defense against assault and battery? If he died, and maybe his health was so poor he might have, e.g., he might have had a heart condition or high blood pressure which could yield a fatal stroke, then the police would be guilty of murder -- literally murder. And they should be prosecuted for just that. Better not ask me to serve on a jury where that poor guy was the plaintiff -- I'd call for the cops to be treated like wild, mad, rabid dogs, enemies of the citizens, making war on the citizens, sadists. The situation is entirely similar to what the Nazi Brown Shirts did in Hitler's Germany: In that country, some citizens were regarded as unwanted. Then, via the Brown Shirt thugs, those citizens were subject to just whatever, robbery, beatings, murder. Now in SF, some citizens are again regarded as unwanted, and the police act like the Nazi Brown Shirts and rob, beat, and, maybe, murder such citizens. Not much difference. It's inhumanity of man to man, and it's ugly. We've seen the consequences from Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, ISIS, and more. We don't like it. We have our Constitution to help stop it. We don't want it. One really good use of smartphones, their video capabilities, the Internet, social media, and the US legal system is, finally, to stop this ugly stuff. Police: Here's your lesson. Here in the US, that stuff's going to stop. It's going to stop the easy way or the hard way. I have to believe you want the hard way, and it's coming. Net, the power in the US is definitely not in the hands of the police and, instead, is in the hands of the voting citizens. And, each such story, with video, on the Internet creates a lot of votes to stop the ugly stuff, via the hard way if necessary. Cops will be going to jail, for assault and battery, murder, etc., for long terms but likely in prison conditions where they won't last even six months. Blue shirts, you're going to have to stop that Nazi stuff, however much it pains you not to be a thug -- you can't beat the voting citizens with video cameras. Can't happen. All we have to do is quietly, calmly, privately pull a lever in a voting booth, and you and your Nazi behavior are toast.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

It is worth taking a step back and recalling how long the problem of police brutality existed BEFORE it became a hot-button issue. For the longest time, raising such issues would incite accusations that one is either sympathetic to criminals or naively on the track to "Escape from NY" levels of crime. Theodore Roosevelt regretted not having reformed American health care in his time in office. It took this long to get the imperfect ACA. Police brutality as a national issue is no different. Unless there is serious, sustained momentum for change, it simply won't come. This video should be such a reminder.

tsotha 11y ago
Police brutality is in the headlines a lot recently because there are factions that benefit from it politically. When that's no longer true it'll drop out of the headlines regardless of what gets done. I hope people who are sympathetic to doing something about it realize this. They don't have an unlimited amount of time to come up with reasonable proposals.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Correct, and fans of the Voting Rights Act should be there as a reminder that "rights" can be hard lost as they are hard won. There is no inevitably in humanity. The best we can expect is reproduction.

snurk 11y ago

I don't see a problem; he was resisting and refused to comply. And he continued to resist and fight even when he was on the ground. The article's main complaint was that the police held him down. There are an endless number of unbalanced and sociopathic people in the U.S. who believe they're entitled to [EDIT: resist] the police, wrestle with them, etc. You're not. And the solution to this so-called police "brutality" is to simply be respectful, stop talking, and follow directions. For sure, perhaps the police could have employed a more clever psychological de-escalation technique. That'd be an interesting training issue to research and borrow from other location that deploy it successfully. But here was a person who was resisting arrest and disobeying instructions.

EliRivers 11y ago
I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest? I suspect that even in the US it's not yet technically a crime to choose to be about your lawful business rather than do whatever a police officer tells you when you're not under arrest. There are an endless number of unbalanced and sociopathic people in the U.S. who believe they're entitled to argue with the police There are also an endless number of balanced individuals who are entitled to argue. Everyone is entitled to argue. The police aren't magic. The police aren't gods. The police are (but should not be) above the law. And the solution to this so-called police "brutality" is to simply be respectful, stop talking, and follow directions. And the solution to being raped is to stay at home and never go outside? The solution to getting shot is to hide under your bed twenty four hours a day? Or is crime only acceptable from police officers?
- snurk 11y ago
  > I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest? Actually, yes, it's called a Terry Stop. Whether he _ended up_ in a squad car and brought to jail isn't the issue.
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    A "Terry Stop" relies on reasonable suspicion. A patdown is permitted to check for weaponry. If this was a Terry Stop, they went so far that they turned it into something else; pinning an unarmed one-legged man to the ground, stamping on his legs, is not a Terry Stop. Reminds me of the bullshit they pull where they pick someone up, mess him around, and then kick him back onto the street whenever they feel like it; because they can say "it wasn't actually an arrest" they get away with it. If this was not a Terry Stop, then it's all just more bullshit from bullyboys in uniform. You see the footage. Seriously, how do you perform the mental gymnastics to defend this blatantly unacceptable activity? They're not heroes. They're out of control bullies wearing uniforms, and the longer we let them get away with this sort of nonsense, the worse it's going to get.

Mz 11y ago

I am homeless. I did not read the entire article because the author really does not know what happened yet assumes the worst about the police. First, as someone who is both homeless and seriously handicapped, I feel the article is offensive and dehumanizing to people like me for its clear assumption that poverty and a handicap makes someone incapable of being a real threat. That is beyond insulting and in no way helps get people like me and our actual problems taken more seriously. Second, although there is plenty of classicism in the world and this does negatively impact my life, I think I am far more aware if its impact in online forums than IRL. Some people IRL make my life unnecessarily harder with their unfounded conclusions about me. More people online seem to dismiss the possibility that I have a brain and something of value to contribute to the conversation and so on. Third, it is not uncommon for local cops to be familiar with local homeless people. A high percentage of people on the street have either medical or mental health issues. Many of them are self medicating with drugs or alcohol. Society as a whole needs to come up with better solutions, but, while waiting for those solutions, cops still need to protect the public from sometimes irrational behaviour. If they know this guy and have a long history with him, sending him to a hospital may be the most humane, compassionate answer available. I was woke up one night by a cop looking for another homeless person who was wanted for violent assault. When I was woke up, it was very aggressive because he was looking for a violent man and prepared for the worst. When he saw who I was, he said "Oh, it's you. I know who you are. You can put your hands down." He then went into social worker mode. I had not interacted directly with the police in that town before but I was recognized and known to be not a troublemaker. The antidote to racism, sexism, classicism etc is to judge individuals as individuals and take things on a case by case basis. This article is very guilty of not doing that. It makes sweeping judgements of both the cops and the individual they sent to a hospital, without knowing enough about what happened to justify those conclusions. There are a great many things wrong with how we deal with homelessness in this country and I know racism, classicism, sexism etc are very real and do serious harm to people. But I don't see this article helping in any way to solve that problem.

Mithaldu 11y ago
Thank you for explaining very clearly what is wrong with the judgements passed in that article. The entire thing felt wrong in a way i could not articulate, but you managed to articulate it in an amazingly lucid manner. :)

redml 11y ago

A guy resisting arrest makes front page on hacker news because its near twitter HQ? Seriously?

FireBeyond 11y ago
It's got a lot better, but in years past we've had stories make front page because someone got shot near Facebook, and a serious car accident near Twitter HQ.