According to published reports, an armed MBTA police officer drew a gun on a crowded bus while attempting to subdue an unarmed woman:
A Massachusetts transit police officer was caught on video hitting an unarmed woman with a baton and drawing his firearm in a crowded bus as onlookers yelled for him to “drop the gun.”
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police Department says it is investigating the video posted to Facebook Friday, which occurred in Dudley Square in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood earlier that day.
Watch the video (permissions prohibit me from embedding it) and see for yourself. The MBTA claims that the beginning of the altercation is not recorded. So be it.
What I see and hear is a police officer striking a woman multiple times. The apparent effect (not surprisingly) is to aggravate the encounter. At about 0:38 into the altercation, the officer draws his weapon. The terrified crowd begins to yell “Drop the gun”. The officer holsters his weapon at 1:13.
I note that the officer and woman (as well as most of the onlookers) are black, so at last this is not another example of racist police violence.
Why do we continue to tolerate police officers who worsen already tense situations by threatening lethal violence? The bus was stationary and stopped in a busy MBTA station. Backup was on its way.
At best, this video shows a police officer taking actions that worsen, rather than calm, an encounter with an unarmed woman. When that officer unholstered his weapon, he immediately jeopardized the lives of the many bystanders on the bus.
There is no excuse for this behavior from our police. We should not tolerate it.
…as to why the cop was trying to subdue the woman in the first place?
The linked article says she had been identified as a thief. (It would be helpful to provide as much info as possible in the diary text as the slowness of my computer makes clicking links an exercise in patience.)
The article does say the cop is put on leave for an investigation so I wouldn’t be so quick to say it’s tolerated. Bad things happen. Just because they do doesn’t been we like it.
Whatever it was that provoked the attempted arrest is irrelevant. The woman was unarmed. As the bystanders yelled repeatedly on the videotape, she wasn’t going anywhere. There was no justification for the officer to draw his gun. In my view, that’s what’s important about this episode and the diary, and that’s why I don’t mention it in the thread-starter.
Multiple episodes like this have been posted and discussed here. How many of the officers involved have been disciplined after the “investigations” that are routinely promised? I see precious little evidence that authorities have disciplined the out-of-control Medford detective that was highlighted here earlier this year, even though published reports strongly suggest that Mr. Lebert has a long and troubled history.
It is not enough to say “bad things happen”. We went bonkers after two kids made a bad thing happen at the Boston Marathon a few years ago — authorities reacted (some say over-reacted) swiftly and with overwhelming force in a very visible attempt to ensure that that bad thing never happened again.
As I’ve said before, poorly trained, heavily armed, and dangerously aggressive police are currently a more immediate threat to the Massachusetts public than any would-be terrorist.
It’s time to stop making excuses and start making changes.
Here is a more recent story about the “investigation” of Stephen LeBert, with even more damning evidence of his long history of abusive and bizarre behavior.
From this story (emphasis mine):
There are far too many Stephen LeBerts in uniform in Massachusetts today — in my view, that is why so many of these “bad things” continue to happen.
I tend to agree that since the person was unarmed a gun almost certainly wasn’t necessary, but I don’t like rendering a judgement without knowing the whole story. Otherwise, there is a chance this person had been identified as a suspect in a violent crime and the word came down she was potentially armed and dangerous. I’m not making excuses, but we should let investigations happen before we rush to judgement. That’s good practice in any context.
I’m sorry, but you ARE making excuses.
There will ALWAYS be a chance that even the most unlikely things will happen. There is strong, even overwhelming, evidence that these “investigations” do nothing but cover up embarrassing episodes.
Even in the unlikely event that your speculation were true, the officer should still NOT have drawn his gun. Even if the woman in the video was a suspect in a violent crime, and even if she was believed to be armed and dangerous, she did NOT go for a weapon. She made no movement to suggest that she intended to. The effect of the officer’s action was to escalate an already tense situation and dramatically increase the chances of grave injury or death to the many innocents on the stopped bus.
I’m glad the MBTA claims to be investigating this incident. I’m glad the officer has been taken off the street during that investigation.
This episode, like too many others, should never have happened. I don’t need an “investigation” to know that.
That’s where we fundamentally part company. I have no idea how likely or not my speculation would be to be true, and I’m certainly not going to find out by watching a video that didn’t start from the beginning.
You’ve offered one very unlikely scenario, unsupported by any of the reporting of this incident. Even in that scenario, you’ve not attempted to explain how the actions we all saw in the video would be justified. Suspected theft, as alleged by the MBTA, surely does not merit the use — and therefore threat — of lethal force.
The video shows what actually happened. You’ve offered no plausible scenario that excuses the facts.
I think I said I agreed that in this instance it wasn’t justified, but in general there does need to be an investigation if consequences are going to follow. The alternative is to deprive the cop of his due process and I can’t agree with that. The vibe I thought I was getting is just fire the guy based on this clip, no questions asked, which I cannot abide.
I’m glad there’s an investigation, and have not suggested that there shouldn’t be. What I’ve said is that I don’t need an investigation to know that this behavior has to stop. In my view, the purpose of the investigation is to establish the facts so that the behavior that brought about those facts can be altered in future altercations.
I have not suggested that the officer be fired. I’ve not advocated denying the officer due process.
In most cases like this, the need for an “investigation” is the mechanism used to shove the episode under the carpet, buy time, and eventually exonerate the officer and department (after a long enough delay that nobody is paying attention).
The vibe I want you to get from me is that we need to reset how we react to situations like this so that we stop these episodes from happening.
The sort of “investigation” I’d like to see includes the following:
– Why do we need so many police agencies in Massachusetts? Why do we need the MBTA police AT ALL? What do they do that state or local police cannot?
– Why do MBTA police need to be armed?
– How many dangerously unstable thugs like Stephen LeBert or Aaron McFarlane are working for law enforcement agencies today? The MBTA says that the officer in this episode “is a respected veteran and that the department has not had any issues with him in the past”. If a respected veteran thus admired by his agency behaves like this, what is the agency doing wrong that allows this? How many MBTA police are on the job that the agency HAS had issues with in the past?
Another resource I’d like to see is a website, analogous to sourcewatch.org, where government handling of episodes like this can be tracked. I’d very much like the RESULTS of an investigation to be as available to the public as the spokespeople are who initiate them.
I support investigations of episodes like this. I oppose self-serving whitewashes.
Given that the “world wide web” is defined by links and the fact that any poster can’t anticipate which information is “helpful” for any particular reader, I don’t think that there is much that can be done on this front.
FWIW, slowness might also be attributable to your Internet connection. In any case, if you can’t fix the slowness, one thing you might consider (if you don’t already do so) is to open links in a new tab or window. This can be done on Windows or Macs with a right-click and/or a control-click. That way, while you are waiting for a link to load, you can still read through what is on the page that contained the link.
I need a new one as non-internet stuff is slow too and in my experience trying to have more than one tab or window open slows everything down. To me this particular point was a glaring omission that could have easily biased the reader to think about the story a certain way.
I suggest you download the free program ccleaner and use it. Every installation of Windows accumulates lots of useless files as it ages; after a while, these files slow everything down. ccleaner cleans out the crap. I’ve used it for several years without any problems, on several different machines. It has other functions that let you easily control startup programs, uninstall programs you don’t use, and lots more. It can also clean the Registry. Some people are wary (not without reason) of anything that modifies the Registry, but ccleaner makes a backup in case of trouble, so you can undo any changes. I have never encountered a problem from the ccleaner Registry cleaning, but that backup has rescued me from problems caused by other software updates.
So because he’s black he can’t make incorrect behavioral decisions based on the race of people he is interacting with?
Fair enough.
Perhaps incorrectly, I put this in a different category from white cops beating down and waving guns at (or shooting) black civilians in a bus stopped at a busy station in a predominantly black neighborhoos.
I think a big issue with these kinds of cases is that everyone ends up focusing on the individuals involved. An extreme situation is the Michael Brown case where everyone rushes to villify or victimize either participant depending on their predetermined leanings in the case.
It doesn’t change minds, and throwing Wilson in jail (not that I am happy he is free) doesn’t change the culture that caused him to kill Michael Brown. We need a bottom up review of every police force in America to make sure that the use of force is utilized as a last resort-as a general principle, and then to specifically address the crisis of policing in black communities. And repairing the economic problems underlying the entire dichotomy would be the next big step, as Ta Nehisi Coates and others have persuasively argued.
The MBTA Cop didn’t even ask the bystanders to get off the bus, so I wonder how much of a “threat” this woman posed to the cop and other passengers … Enough to justify pulling the handgun out? This one is bad, and I’m hoping they take that handgun from this cop ASAP.
got the cop in McKinney, TX fired.
The thing is, there are a few, if any, statutes governing the police use of excessive or lethal force. Should these things go to court, everything hinges on a couple of cases with fairly low thresholds for the police action.
For better or worse, the MBTA cop didn’t point his weapon at anybody. He instead waved it around a bus full of bystanders.