This is one of the most disturbing events I have witnessed in a long time. A few days ago, I wrote a piece on the Republican congresspeople who refused to vote on a bill to protect senior citizens from scammers. Another breaking story at the time was from Loveland, Colorado, where a 73-year-old woman with dementia was wandering home. Evidently she forgot to pay $13 to a local store, the store took the items back and called the police. You can see from the body cam that the woman is not “resisting arrest,” she’s spaced out and doesn’t know what’s going on.
This is a lengthy video, fourteen minutes, but it is worth the time to get a slice of life from a small town police department and see how callous and indifferent these people are. The most shocking part is the “wait for the pop” when the male cop deliberately dislocates and fractures the old woman’s shoulder. I don’t want to speculate about how this guy was raised, but some twig got badly bent and this is the warped tree that is the grown man.
This is gut wrenching. The old woman, ridiculously bound and restrained, is in a cell, with a broken arm, and the two arresting officers are watching the body cam footage, like it was a wedding video or something, and reminiscing. The arresting officers told the jail staff that the woman was uninjured, when she was clearly injured and crying out.
I am beyond trying to understand what kind of person goes into law enforcement these days. In my life, I have had two friends who were cops. One was an athletic guy that I grew up with, and he didn’t really find himself as a young man, and so he got into law enforcement for a time. Another was a fellow I went to law school with, who had completed his twenty years on the force, had his pension secured and was still young enough to go farther in his career. He was very sharp and had a lot of EQ, emotional intelligence. There is no way he would have ever participated in an incident like this and I know he wouldn’t have tolerated it in another officer.
So who is this new breed of cop out on the streets? They seem to have zero EQ, zero ability to assess the true dimensions of a situation, and they react grotesquely and inappropriately. They seem to enjoy phuquing with people, simply because they can. That is not being a public servant, that is being a public menace. It is a complete betrayal of trust and a violation of all of the ethics of the job.
These two so called officers gloried in their power, in their ability to mess up this poor, confused senior citizen. A real cop — a real human being, forget the cop — would have simply said, “Ma’am, are you all right? We heard there was a problem at the store,” etc. etc. They had a chance to be of service and handle this matter properly. Obviously, they have no clue how to do that.
I hope they are fired. I hope they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. People like this have no business in law enforcement.
And just as a personal note on the story from last week, where the likes of Gohmert, Boebert, Greene, et. al. nixed legislation to protect seniors from telephone scams, I got one of the scammer calls. It was enough to scare the beejesus out of a normal person and if the person was a bit slow, it could have been a disaster.
Long story short, the call starts out with a recording that you are in legal trouble and you need to drop everything and push one to talk to somebody. Then the live person gets on the phone, and the guy who I talked to informed me that he was from the Social Security Administration and that my SSN had been “compromised” and “that’s why you’re being accused of money laundering” and “the local police have all the details.”
So I played along and sure enough, he wanted to get all the rest of the personal information from me so that he could perform identity theft. He didn’t have anything beyond my name and age and so he needed my birthdate and that’s when I said, “Is the job market so tough that you can’t make a living any other way except to target old people and terrorize them, with lies? Are you okay, as a person, with this way of being in the world?” (silence) (click)
Point being, I knew what the call was from the outset, but a lot of people would not have. The script they were pushing was scary and pushed buttons. That was evident to me, how somebody less sophisticated could have been taken in.
Seniors need to be protected on this level and they absolutely need to be protected from violent, predatory cops. The quality of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens and this abuse of seniors cannot be allowed. This is not America.
This is absolutely “America”. It is how we’ve treated People of Color; LGBTQ+ and many others until now we have an increasing population of mentally challenged elders. It’s NOW an issue because it is happening to US, not “THEM”, but US. We have been blissfully blind to the horrors of “policing” for perhaps centuries and now the worst among us are going into the “authoritarian careers”, they are taking it out on US. It IS how “America” treats the weakest, most vulnerable among us. To that kind of inhumane creature, there is no difference between that demented old white woman and a homeless person, a protestor, a Person of Color, an LGBTQ+ person or any other who are not “ME”. We are all “the other”.
This is true. She could have been a homeless person. She could have been a young black person, or an old Hispanic man, or you name it. That kind of mentality is just looking for a victim. This tape shocked me. It’s so inhumane. The woman is clearly not with it. All she needed was a ride home and a talk with her relatives. That’s it. She didn’t need to be thrown on the ground, trussed like a farm animal, none of that.
Maybe we could get the home numbers (as well as the numbers for their DC residences) of those GOP Congressional scum and make them public enough for the scammers to use.
Anyone else think these scum would be heading to some friendly outlet to complain about these scam phone calls and how “someone” should do something about them? (I say a “friendly outlet” because they wouldn’t want to be challenged with those pesky “Well, there was a bill and you voted against it” type of comments from the talking head hosts.)
The call was scary. I wish I had thought to try and record it. Where they make their mistake, though, is in going too far. The way they made it sound is that I was in very deep doo doo and the fact is, when you’re in trouble that deep, you don’t find out by a phone call. Hopefully, that tips off enough people that it’s a scam. But it was a cleverly crafted scam, I must say.
I used to get IRS scam calls back when I had a land-line phone. Usually they said I was in trouble of some kind, and I needed to call the Iowa Revenue Service at a certain phone number. I looked up the number for the Iowa Revenue Service, and the number they gave was not even close. I also talked to the IRS, and like their federal counterpart, they never call people, they notify by mail.
You know, with all the boomers out there, and most of them have reached that part of life where with all the body aches and difficulty standing for long periods, or like this poor suffering lady, sitting for long times on a hard bench, THEN have an injury she can’t relieve from that bench, or even put it into words other than the frightening situation has left her with moans, yelps and unanswered pleas for help …
Pure evil attack and the laughing/entertainment at the expense of the lady’s pain and suffering, THIS is a horrifying situation, there are no words that could be explained to a person with dementia, comforting EMT’s would have seen right away the person’s problems, the store personnel should have been more responsive to this lady’s problems and helped her get home or called the family … most people with dementia carry identification with family contact info … it used to be the customer is always right, and should be given an opportunity to explain or be calmly managed … I think Walmart should have handled this better before the hellish treatment she was dealt …
Same question could be asked, why did so many become Nazi’s and SS? Power. Total power to do whatever they wanted to to whomeever they wanted to do it to and thinking there were no consequences. Humanity is in a big hurt right now in so many ways.
These guys are sadistic and should not be in any police force or other position of authority. What is the standard for the Loveland (TX?) police hiring? They need psychological testing as part of the hiring procedure to weed out Nazi-like indifference to human suffering.
It’s Loveland, Colorado. I used to live in this congressional district, for six years. But that was over 40 years ago. The cops were not nuts like this 40 years ago. My direct experience is very limited, but this is some recent development, this level of sadism and sickness.
This is sickening, gut-wrenching & fills me with a cold rage. Pigs is the epithet that immediately comes to mind, but that’s an insult to pigs. This is the kind of sadistic cruelty & inhumanity that gives policing a bad name, but it’s not an isolated case of ‘bad apples’; it’s the norm. Is it any wonder that white nationalist ‘militia’ groups infiltrate & recruit police forces, or that active-duty police are members of such groups? They’re the same caliber of people who filled the ranks of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Sturmabteilung.
I read an article about the incident and the woman weighs less than 90 pounds. Also, when she attempted to leave the store without paying and the store people confronted her, she attempted to pay. They wouldn’t take her money and called the police. She also has more injuries, like broken ribs. I think I remember that he family is suing.
The family is suing. Their lawyer posted this to social media.
This kind of shit is unspeakable. I read about this after it happened, and was in total disbelief. For them to say she had no injuries – they dislocated her shoulder, broke her arm, and tore her rotator cuff (which is immensely painful). Somewhere in the area there has to be a good prosecutor who can have them charged with assault and battery. The proof is on the tape.
Amen to what Ursula said and to the comments. To paraphrase, ” a society may be judged by how it treats the most vulnerable.”
Unfortunately, many police departments are having more and more difficulty recruiting the kind of people we’d like to see doing that work. The constant harsh scrutiny, the blame for things they had no part of, decisions they didn’t make, racist attitudes they do not share is driving good officers out of the profession and not attracting good replacements. My department has to take the best of the mediocre candidates it gets because they’re the only ones applying. Not many empathetic, mature people want to risk their lives only to be back stabbed by their command staff and heaped with rage and venom on the street. Easily two dozen, probably more, in my department have applications in elsewhere–and they’re the ones we’d like to retain.
Empathy: many people have thought on this issue.
“The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes”
― Barack Obama
“The world doesn’t just revolve around you. There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit.”
― Barack Obama
“My third piece of advice is to cultivate a sense of empathy – to put yourself in other people’s shoes – to see the world from their eyes. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.”
― Barack Obama
“Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen.”
― Barack Obama
We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.
― Barack Obama
Empathy, alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.”― Eric Hoffer
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” ~ G. M Gilbert at The Nuremburg Trials
It’s the last one that rings most true.
Unfreakinbelievable. I hope that lady’s family gets the maximum compensation allowed by law, and then some. When I was 22, I worked at a place called Venture. It was very similar to Target or Walmart. We had an old lady that tried to steal food and other necessities. Our Store Manager was called and she took the lady through the store and bought everything the woman needed. She then had the cops take the gal home. No charges were filed, ever! Another lady used to steal canned cat food. It was cheaper for her to buy that instead of human food. Management did the same thing for her as they did for the other lady. Now that’s what I call empathy/humanity.
As for the Social Security calls, I was getting those 5 or 6 times a day at one point. I called Social Security and they had me file a report online, and told me to do that every time I received one of those calls. Now I only get them occasionally.
This is revolting and heart wrenching to watch. This frail elderly woman, who could not possibly be a threat to the Police, is treated like a sack of potatoes and the cops at the scene KNOW that they’ve hurt her but do not stop “man handling” her. Having experienced a broken bone or two in my life, I can easily imagine the pain this woman must have been in. It’s excruciating. Even if it was just a dislocated shoulder, that is extremely painful. The way they treated her was entirely uncalled for. It reminds me of watching the video showing how an elderly man was shoved backward by a National Guardsman during one of the demonstrations last year and hit his head on the concrete. Nobody helped him as blood ran from his ears. Trump opined that he was faking it…remember that? Viewing the video afterwards, the Police involved KNOW they overdid it, and yet they smirk at the situation. Throw the damn book at them, PLEASE!
As the saying goes, some people become assholes by being cops, some become cops BECAUSE they’re assholes