With the recent video footage showing several police officers pinning and arresting a one-legged Black man on a busy street in San Francisco, the question posed, internationally, is: ‘What does it take for people of colour to NOT face the fear of open, brutal attacks by American law-enforcers?’ and ‘Just how many attacks of this nature is taking place – possibly on a daily basis?’
The afore mentioned attack, filmed by a passerby, sparking fury on worldwide news outlets and social media and as footage - uploaded to YouTube - shows five officers straddling the homeless man on the floor, one of whom kneeled across the man's artificial limb, as they attempted to handcuff him throughout the 11-minute ordeal which also saw an officer stump on the prosthetic leg.
The 42-year-old disabled man can be heard screaming: “What are you doing this for? And he repeats this throughout the footage. He can be heard pleading with officers that he is in pain.
It is not immediately clear what provoked the incident, but a leading magazine journalist who also filmed the video, claimed officers were called to a report of a man waving sticks in the air. The article claims that those sticks were the man's crutches.
It’s the latest in a long line of ‘outed’ police attacks on predominantly Black men, especially since the brutal beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1992, with unexplained killings of innocent men forming a new-formed impression of ‘the land of opportunity.’ Opportunity for who exactly?