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inthefade:

I have some problems with the whole Occupy Wall Street thing and I may not see eye to eye with the protesters on some issues but, damn. This video made me want to throw up. Rounding up non-violent protesters into a pen just to mace them? That’s reprehensible. 

Pay close attention to the man who uses the pepper spray. It’s not a street-level cop. Sergeants, detectives and officers wear blue. They’re the guys (and ladies) you get when you call the cops about a crime or when you get busted for committing a crime. They’re also the guys seen here corralling the protestors. If you look closely, you can see that they’re all over this scene. It is — quite literally — bulls on parade.

But.

Look closely as the barricaded crowd is sprayed. That’s a white shirt holding that spray bottle. And it appears the man has two bars on his uniform hat. That makes him a captain. Captains are desk jockeys and politicians. Think of Bunny Coleman or Valchek from The Wire. (They’re actually Majors, but that’s the Baltimore PD equivalent.) That’s the kind of guy who walks up and sprays these people. 

This guy got out of his desk chair, took an elevator to the street, and got chauffeured to this scene. There’s no reason he should have ever been this close to the protestors. There’s no reason for him to be anywhere but in the background giving orders. His job is to develop strategies for particular situations and order commands to implement those strategies — all with an objective view uninfluenced by the highly emotional environment of human interaction that his officers face on the street.

His job here is to calm both the citizens and his officers and end this situation as peacefully and with as little violence as possible. Instead, the motherfucker walked up and pepper-sprayed citizens that were already rendered defenseless by people in his command.

This wasn’t just a bullshit move. It was assault. He should lose his bars and possibly his badge. He should also be charged and prosecuted. Fuck this guy. Fuck him and the decades of pent-up violence, self-hate and misogyny he rode in on.