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19 Aug, 2015 04:56

SF police call for backup to ‘deal’ with one-legged suspect was ‘troubling’ – witness

The fact that San Francisco cops dealing with a one-legged, black homeless guy called for backup was the most troubling aspect of the whole incident, a witness told RT. Meanwhile, a former police officer said that US cops have forgotten how to treat people as human beings.

Journalist Chaedria LaBouvier, who witnessed the appalling scene in San Francisco’s downtown financial district, told RT that everyone was “shocked that there would be this much force and it would be warranted.”

“You could just see this one black man and this wall of blue forming around him,” she said. “The more he said ‘No!’ and more he questioned them ‘Why are you doing this?’ the worse it got in terms of their determination to assert their force.”

READ MORE: ‘14 San Francisco cops’ gang up on homeless man ‘armed’ with crutches (VIDEO)

She explained that police ganged up on the man and called up for backup even before any significant crowd of bystanders gathered around to “make sure they did not kill him essentially.”

“You can see in the video that there are more police that arrive, which means there was a call that someone placed saying that they need more. There weren’t 14 at the scene, but literally someone made that call and that’s what is troubling, that’s what is a problem,” LaBouvier added.

According to San Francisco Police spokeswoman Grace Gatpandan, officers confronted the 42-year-old man, who had an outstanding felony warrant, because he was “waving around wooden sticks” and detained him for a mental health evaluation. She said city police would “look into this situation thoroughly and determine if there were any violations of department policy.”

Meanwhile a former Baltimore police officer Michael Wood told RT he was puzzled by the determination of SFPD to assert force despite the growing number of witnesses, and could not find any “remotely plausible” rationality to have this situation transpire the way it did.

“I can’t understand at all why there’s that many people there for somebody with one leg. It is clearly indicative of our training problems that we don’t know how to handle something that would seemingly be so obvious and easy to handle,” he said. “It’s like the cops think that because they can legally do that then it is ok, but they are just leaving the moral problems out.”

There is a problem with the whole culture of law enforcement in the US society, which has shifted to “Us vs. Them” and a “thin blue line” showing that they are “different from everybody.”

“But when you are different from everybody, you clearly do not know how to emphasize and treat people like they are human beings,” Wood said.

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