The Big Lie About Police Brutality is Claiming it's not Rampant

Police brutality is in the news, thanks to the widespread availability of amateur video and the omnipresence of security cameras. We've seen scene after scene of police beating the crap out of, and even shooting and killing unarmed or minimally dangerous students, women, old men and crazy people, many of them after they have been handcuffed and checked for weapons. The police brass, and leading politicians who oversee the departments involved, nearly always have the same answer: This is not the norm, these are isolated incidents, police violence is not on the rise. The thing is, of course, it is on the rise. Just as the exonerations of supposed murders and rapists are only those where there was DNA available to prove their innocence, while many more are also clearly wrongly facing death or long prison sentences, the scenes of brutality we're seeing on the videos are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg too. What is different is that we're seeing these things at all. It used to be that getting videos of police brutality was very rare -- like the taping of the notorious police assault on the prone body of Rodney King by Los Angeles cops during a traffic stop. It just happened that someone with a video camera was at the scene when it occurred. Nowadays everyone with a cellphone is a potential videographer, so we're seeing more of what really goes on when police make their arrests. Read more