It’s not just police killings: Tazing and Bust of Videotaper Shows Abuse of Blacks is Just Normal Philly Cop Behavior

By Linn Washington Jr.

A July 2013 Philadelphia police attack on Sharif Anderson, where officers beat, kicked and shot Anderson twice with a Taser, is more than just another ugly incident of abuse by a big city police force long assailed for its persistent brutality and corruption.

That police assault on Anderson provides a chilling case study of so much that is wrong within the criminal justice system in Philadelphia and too many places across America. This ‘wrong’ extends from police officers to police commanders through prosecutors.

“I was in disbelief,” Sharif Anderson said about the police attack that occurred when officers rushed him while he was using his smart phone to video other police roughing-up some of his colleagues.

Incredibly, the ‘crime’ of videoing police that triggered the attack on and arrest of Anderson is not really a crime in Philadelphia (or anywhere else in the US for that matter). Even going beyond recent court decisions on the issue, the city’s police commissioner had issued directives in 2011 and in 2012 telling his officers that citizens had a right to video police – directives apparently disregarded by the officers involved in Anderson’s arrest.

Given the fact that the police commissioner had barred arrests of citizens for photographing and/or videoing police, some legal observers contend Philadelphia prosecutors should have rejected the police arrests of Anderson and four others from that 2013 incident because those arrests arose from violations of the commissioner’s directives. But prosecutors accepted police claims that “disorderly conduct,” not videoing, had precipitated the arrest of Anderson.

“I was assaulted and they charge me with assault,” Anderson recounted. “A cop claimed I bruised his hand in the midst of him pummeling me.”

The police assault on Anderson left him with “permanent injuries as a result of excessive force including striking and electrocuting,” stated the lawsuit Anderson filed recently against the Philadelphia Police Department. That assault, the lawsuit continued, has caused Anderson to incur “substantial legal fees” required to retain a lawyer to fight the criminal charges filed following his arrest.

Anderson said that 2013 arrest has impacted his life in other ways. “I tried to get another job but was denied due to this arrest.”

The arrest and the [alleged] assault on Anderson evidences the daily, street-level abuses that ignite tensions between citizens and police in non-white communities. Encounters where police curse at, falsely accuse, harass and improperly search law-abiding citizens far outnumber encounters involving brutality and fatal shootings...

For the rest of this article in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2772