[JoshTriplett]

Of course. Questioning their authority is a status challenge, and they're accustomed to having their status go unchallenged. Hence, punitive punishment.

One of many aspects of improving law enforcement would be pointedly training out and averting any perception of being "above" people. "Public servant" is a phrase for a reason.

[ryandrake]

Yea it’s as simple and stupid as that. This (black) peasant isn’t respecting our authority and higher status. If we let one slide then everyone is going to think we are equal to them. In their logic, they have to fight in court.

[SaltyBackendGuy]

This is a common archetype when people get challenged (escalation of commitment), they effectively double down. I don't necessarily think it was racially motivated (but also don't doubt that it could have been).

[mywittyname]

> don't necessarily think it was racially motivated

Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend.

And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared.

If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable.

[underlipton]

American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around.

And there is some evidence that the institutions themselves recognize this (or they did, until we elected an openly-corrupt white supremacist to the highest office): https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/us-doj-res...

[gnerd00]

> American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated

the history of the United States is a collection of States and territories, forming under very different legal conditions over 100+ years or so.. that blanket statement is without context or detail aka insufficient.

[johnnyanmac]

Hard to give an entire 8th grade history curriculum in this setting. So thars an exercise left to the reader.

[gnerd00]

ok - then most 9th graders would know that slavery was explicitly illegal in many US States from the day before they were founded.. Race-based slavery is not at all unique to the USA. Only people who do not know history think otherwise.. So this commentor a)does not know 9th grade level US history, and b) does not know high school level world history.

yes agree - education is an exercise for the reader.. you have to actually read something to learn from books.

[jepj57]

Joe Biden left office Jan 20, 2025.