Police Brutality?

Check out 00:25. Some of you have probably seen this before, but it's new to me. The Smoking Gun says that the matter is being investigated. According to the officer:

[the cyclist] drove his bicycle directly into him, knocking the cop to the ground and causing "lacerations on deponent's forearm." The video, of course, shows Pogan delivering a blow that would have made former Oakland Raider Jack Tatum proud. Pogan also claimed that Long resisted arrest and even exclaimed, "You are pawns in the game, I'm gonna have your job."

Too bad for the cop that someone in the crowd got the whole thing on film, showing the cop literally trying to tackle him, even while the cyclist is trying to evade. What in the world happened to set this cop off? There's literally hundreds of cyclists going past him, and he just snaps and randomly picks this guy?



Update. The NYT tells the interesting story about how the video was acquired. The Critical Mass bike ride is promoted by a group called Time's Up. And the person filming the attack contacted Time's Up and sold them the tape. He wanted to get $1,500 for it, but they agreed to $310. Kind of disappointing that he tried to make a buck off of delivering this media, given that the rider was actually arrested and put in jail for 26 hours for allegedly driving straight at the officer (the tape suggests that that is a fabrication, at best). But whatever, thankfully Time's Up sought to take care of this cyclist. This just shows one of the advantageous ways that technology can affect policy brutality. If this video didn't exist, the cyclist would be sitting in jail and probably have a criminal record, and no one would be the wiser. But the video exists and is viral now, and so the cop pays the price of his actions. The Internet affects prices in many different ways, but one way it does is that it has the potential to make law enforcement and politicians pay the full price of their actions by raising the probability of detection due to social networks and other viral agents linking to media and keeping stories alive. By raising the probability of detection, hopefully we not only incapacitate the bad cops, but we discourage cops from doing stupid and bad things like this, too.