Off Topic: Everything wrong with what happened in Buffalo
**I wrote this in the heat of the moment a week ago, and didn’t publish it. I’m just going to drop this here now.
***Warning nothing related to finance, only hot takes:
If you haven’t been following the story; this week, horrible footage emerged on social media of a 76 year old protester being shoved to the ground in Buffalo, New York. The video depicts an especially brutal encounter between a civilian and police officer. This comes at a time where such incidents are receiving maximum scrutiny.
The scene includes a graphic encounter of an old man bleeding on the ground as police officers walk carelessly by him (eventually what appears to be a national guardsman breaks from the group think of the police formation to tend to his fellow human). Since then, the entire 57 man “Emergency Response Team” (presumably a euphemism for “riot police”) has resigned in solidarity with the officers involved with the push. Not only is this incident exactly the type of excessive force many Americans are rallying against right now, but it also exposes a police culture which values fraternity over a pure upholding of justice.
Their ignorance was further illustrated in the official justification of the resignations; a spokesperson stated that the bad cops were “simply executing orders”. Practitioners of “just following orders” don’t enjoy great company in history.
We need brave cops to stand forward and challenge this behavior in their ranks.
