Last Thursday, Officer Joseph Harris detained a man in a hospital gown. This handcuffed prisoner, who can be heard on the released video saying “I swear to God, on my daughter’s life, I’ve got fucking fentanyl inside of me, and they’re trying to send me back to jail where they’re going to fucking let me die,” was then brutally beaten by Harris. That cruiser video, released by the Jonesboro Arkansas police department, shows the prisoner asking if anyone cares or believes him before the beating. Someone (presumably Harris) replies “No.”
When the man becomes frantic and wraps the seat belt around his neck, the video shows the cruiser stopping. Harris opens the back door and, for no apparent reason other than to vent his own frustration and hurt someone else, Harris then proceeds to punch and elbow the detainee in the head and then place the man’s head in the open cruiser door and slam it shut.
Within hours of this coming to light, he was fired.
This seems like the right outcome — until we look back and see that he’d already been suspended without pay two years ago for excessive use of force, and was also named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against in June.
This comes in the wake of the murder of Sonya Massey and the swift response to the killer cop Sean Grayson. In the lead-up to November and the elections, the Democrats, who currently control the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, cannot afford to be seen as allowing police murders to go unpunished. They are, after all, running Kamala Harris as the “top cop,” and have already begun to seek conciliation from reactionaries (both Republicans and Independents) by airing her very first campaign video in which she promises to increase the size of the vicious U.S. Border Patrol.
Just as in the murder of Sonya Massey, the beating here is an opportunity for the police to burn one of their own to save their bankrupt system.
We musn’t be mollified. Only fire can burn out the rot in the heart of the U.S. policing system, and that fire must rage broadly and widely.
