[eyelidlessness]

After I posted my comment above, I had to calm myself because I had a spike of anxiety remembering the details of my own experiences with police aggression, and the memory takes me far away from my body into a place of distilled fear. I’m remembering more as I type this.

I think the word you’re looking for is “comprehend”. I do comprehend why police act aggressively without cause or warning. I don’t think it’s benign. I do think you’re very fortunate not to know that.

[sokoloff]

I’ve been detained, pushed down onto the trunk of the cruiser, handcuffed behind my back, patted down, put in the back, backup called, investigated, and released on the scene. The cop had a fairly reasonable reason to do what they did that turned out to be based on a false premise [I "matched the description" but wasn't the guy], I complied, and 15-20 minutes of my life was wasted.

Was it awesome? Nope. Do I get that cops aren’t clairvoyant or omniscient and sometimes people get put in and then taken out of cuffs without being arrested? Yup.

[eyelidlessness]

Please stop and ask yourself if you’re engaging in a harmful way, or if you could be more considerate about how other people experience police confrontations. My anxiety is through the roof from this interaction. I’m reliving physical and psychological trauma I don’t often revisit, including being bludgeoned while trying to get people to safety away from police and having guns drawn on me for asking about the safety of others.

I’m far from the most vulnerable to police abuse. If it’s affected me this much, I have no reason to doubt how much it’s affected people who are more vulnerable. If having my relatively mild experience so callously dismissed feels like being left on my own to suffer whatever trauma I remember, I can’t imagine how it feels for people who experience police violence alone.

No. I don’t give the police the benefit of the doubt. And you won’t convince me to by dismissing my relatively minor traumatic experience and expecting me to extend that dismissal to people who have much worse experiences.

[lazide]

Why is their experience of less trauma less valid than your experience of more trauma?

Both seem valid to me. The world doesn’t owe you foam padding at every turn.

[eyelidlessness]

Their less traumatic experience is valid. I never said it wasn’t. I self edited and rewrote before commenting so many times trying not to misstep here that my more emphatic direct validation apparently didn’t make it in but I’m emphatically glad they haven’t been so traumatized.

That it’s equally valid doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equally important. My experience is less important speaking to how traumatic police encounters are, than experiences of people who’ve experienced worse trauma. It’s just as valid that I don’t share their trauma too.

The world doesn’t owe me anything. It’s a rock hurtling through space that has an unusual concentration of life on it. No one here owes me any consideration at all, “foam padding” or otherwise. But I don’t owe anyone a failure to advocate for myself, either. And I don’t owe anyone a failure to articulate when I think an attitude or argument is harmful or selfish, nor a failure to try to appeal to their better intentions.

[sokoloff]

I shared my less intense experience because it better matched the experience of the subject of the article. They were detained, cuffed, investigated, and released. It was inconvenient.

Your much more severe interaction which included bludgeoning is totally valid but not a direct analog to her (and my) much less severe interaction.

I’m sorry if my words caused you harm. (That’s meant genuinely, as tone cannot be conveyed in text reliably.)