Excerpts:

Emmett Brock, 23, a trans man who was driving home from his job as a teacher when he was beaten by an LASD deputy outside of a 7/11.

Brock was sent to the Norwalk station lockup and booked for three felonies [mayhem, resisting arrest and obstruction, plus misdemeanor failure to obey a police officer]. When he told the staff he is a transgender man, he said, they asked to see his genitals before deciding which holding cell to send him to.

Brock is now jobless and still facing criminal charges, all stemming from a traffic stop the deputy said was based on an air freshener he’d spotted hanging from Brock’s rearview mirror.

A few blocks from the school [on his way home from work], Brock spotted a deputy who appeared to be having a heated conversation with a woman on the side of the road. As he drove by, Brock threw up his middle finger. He didn’t even think the deputy would see it, he said. A few seconds later, he spotted a patrol cruiser following close behind him. It made Brock uneasy. He turned down one side street and then another, trying to figure out whether the cruiser was following him or just going in the same direction. The deputy didn’t turn on his lights or siren, but made every turn Brock did.

[After pulling in to a 7/11] Brock stepped out of his car, Deputy Joseph Benza approached and told him: “I just stopped you,” offering no explanation as to why. Confused, Brock replied, “No, you didn’t.” “Yeah, I did,” the deputy said. Then he grabbed Brock’s arm and forced him to the ground.

At one point, the deputy ordered him to put his arms behind his back — but Brock‘s arms were already pinned under his chest. “Even when I did get them out the way he wanted, he continued to punch me,” Brock told The Times. “He just kept saying, ‘Stop resisting, stop resisting.’ I didn’t understand why he was shouting that because I wasn’t resisting.”

When the incident went through the department’s normal force review process, officials cleared Benza of wrongdoing. One sergeant wrote that Brock was assaultive “with threat of serious bodily injury.” Another sergeant, listed as the watch commander, concurred, saying the incident was within policy and the force used was “objectively reasonable.” The sergeant also checked “no” on the paperwork next to the question: “Could officer safety, tactical communication, or de-escalation techniques have been improved?”

The Sheriff’s Department has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for two other use-of-force incidents caught on camera, including one in which a deputy punched a woman in the face while trying to take her child.

  • @Default_Defect
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    471 year ago

    Screaming “Stop resisting” while beating a helpless person on the ground must be on the first page of the handbook. All too common to hear in these stories.

    • ☭CommieWolf☆
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      121 year ago

      In case anyone doesn’t know, its done because when you watch bodycam footage during a struggle its sometimes hard to tell what’s happening, so to cover their asses, cops will shout things like “stop resisting” “stop fighting” and the like to give the impression that their victim is fighting back, even if they’re not.

      Since watching the footage all you’ll see is a blur, and hearing those words will influence you (and juries) to think the cop had reason to do what they did. Utterly pathetic.

  • Hot Saucerman
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    421 year ago

    I never understand how these charges continue to follow people and wreck their lives after the obviously bullshit charges eventually get dropped.

    Shouldn’t these things be immediately scrubbed from court records for obvious attempts to ruin people’s lives with this shit?

    • ImOnADiet🇵🇸 (He/Him)
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      341 year ago

      because ultimately cops serve capital, they need/receive this power to indiscriminately target, harass, and ultimately ruin the life of anyone who challenges state power

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Becuase once an employer looks up your name, this’ll show up and you’re fucked. You think they’re doing to read the article or just see that you “Assaulted a police officer?”

    • ██████████
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      1 year ago

      they usually are not dropped sadly

      the point is to ruin youf life

      im a stoner who got a degree but becauss of my charges i cant work anywhere except fast food, maybe a real restaurant if i bootlick enough

    • @[email protected]
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      221 year ago

      This is why I preach moving out of the shit hole called America. Needing to be armed isn’t a normal thing. Sorry.

      • Catfish [she/her]
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        61 year ago

        Move to where exactly? It’s not like the average person can up and get citizenship in Canada or Europe. Even then those places don’t save you from crooked cops and all of society’s illnesses. Moving away isn’t gonna change anything here either, it’s selfish to just run away instead of fight.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          I used to believe that “running away” is selfish and cowardly, and I still kinda do to an extent. I usually believe in giving it all your might and then some, and going down fighting.

          But you can’t reasonably expect that out of everyone, or to the same extent, and its not entirely selfish to want to be safer, even if there is an argument to be made that if everyone came together to kick capitalist ass would save more lives in the long run than would die in the violence.

          All my life, I’ve always dreamed of being revolutionary fighter, and I always carry that zeal. But as a backup plan, I hope to start learning Chinese soon, so if I’m somehow able to get my family and my lover and I over to the socialist paradise PRC by comparison to the Amerikkkan shithole, I’m jumping on that chance with very little pause, lest it slip from my grasp. I’ll of course stay and fight as long as I can, and I don’t mean to sound complacent or defeatist. But I want my grandparents to enjoy the last years, if not decades of the remaining twilight eras of their lives, and them enjoy and peacefully pass away in a Utopia rather than die screaming, sadly and violently in a turmoil of a conflict in the ass-end of nowhere.

          And my almost-girlfriend means more than almost anything or anyone to me, and I want her to have a good life that she deserves after the abuse and trauma and sadness and loneliness she has been through. If that means I have to resign myself from the Amerikkkan shithole/ the socialist battleground in the belly of the beast, so be it. I can still contribute to communism in other ways.

        • Life2Space
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          31 year ago

          Not to mention how Americans lack any expertise in foreign languages - hell! The average American isn’t even fully literate in English.

    • ImOnADiet🇵🇸 (He/Him)
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      211 year ago

      I get the sentiment, but I feel like being armed is so much more likely to get you killed at this current point in time. We don’t have any groups going around who will avenge you right now, unfortunately

  • @Ilovethebomb
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    21 year ago

    This sounds like the actual events will differ greatly from his account, to be honest.

    In particular, I think the body camera of the officer will tell a very different story.