An Alabama police officer is on leave while authorities investigate a weekend arrest captured on video in Reform showing a handcuffed man being hit with a stun gun.
The video begins with a white female officer from the Reform Police Department in Pickens County ordering the Black man to “stand up” after he was handcuffed in the roadway in Pickens County.
She then tells him to lay down on the front of a vehicle, which he does face down.
The officer then holds a stun gun to the man’s back while she goes through his pockets. She tells him to “stay still” at which point he says, “I ain’t doing shit, bro. I got a gun right there.”
The officer laughs as she retrieves the gun and says, “Oh yea.”
She then deploys the stun gun directly into the man’s back, telling him to “shut the (expletive) up” as he screams.
The man then begins to cry, repeatedly saying, “Oh my God.”
The officer then says, “Do you want it again?” as the man continues to cry. “Shut your bitch ass up,’’ the officer says
The core issue is unions and police training. If they’re not trained to be professionals that approach everyone equally, then they won’t. And we can’t change the training until we abolish the unions, but I genuinely don’t know how we do that while also increasing professionalism across the board.
My thoughts on the matter are around salary. If we paid more, more quality people would want to be police officers and they would in turn rat out bad police officers for fear of losing a decent salary.
But cops get fraternity in lieu of pay and are expected to be ‘for the blue’ before anything else. This isn’t how it should be.