Entry tags:

rant

red daydreams
There are plenty of things that make me cranky. That's a given. I generally grumble and snark and content myself with willing karmic retribution on people. All in all, it's no big deal.

There are very few things that make me want to go all Boondock Saints and fucking kill.

This is one of them.


As summarized at radgeek.com:

In October 2006, in Salem, Ohio, Steffey, 47 41, was assaulted by one of her cousins in a domestic dispute and knocked unconscious. The family called 911 for help; a sheriff’s deputy named Officer Richard T. Gurlea came out to the house to do some serving and protecting. He asked Hope Steffey for ID, and she mistakenly gave him the wrong driver’s license — one of her late sister’s old licenses, which she kept in her wallet as a memento after her sister died. The cop noticed that it was the wrong license, and, after he got the right one, he refused to give Steffey back her sister’s old license. When she became distraught and pleaded with him to give back the license, Officer Richard T. Gurlea, sanctimoniously instructed her to calm down, ran a criminal check on her real license (which came back completely clean), demanded to search her car, still refused to give her back her keepsake, and finally, public servant that he is, snapped back Shut up about your dead sister. Now treating Steffey, the victim of a violent crime who had called for his help and protection, as if she were herself a criminal, he escalated the confrontation, and, when Hope Steffey dared to point at the pocket where he was holding her keepsake and to shout at him about how important it was to her, Officer Richard T. Gurlea courageously defended himself by grabbing the assault victim he had been dispatched to help, slamming her face-down on the hood of his car, and shouting are you going to stop? Then he threw her down, pinned her to the ground, and handcuffed her. Then he arrested her for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and took her to the Stark County jail.

While they were booking her, one of the guards asked her Have you thought about harming yourself? Bewildered and brutalized, Hope Steffey asked for clarification: Now or ever? The purpose of this question is in order to give the jailers an opportunity to label you as crazy for legal purposes, which, in their minds, is reason enough to inflict on you absolutely any kind of cruelty, violence, or invasion of your privacy, and then, to crown all, to turn around and call your torture and humiliation a precaution taken For Your Own Safety. In this case, apparently the jailers figured that Now or ever? was close enough for government work, so what they did was get a gang of male and female guards to surround Hope Steffey and drag her to a cell, then have least two male officers pin her down and hold her arms (she was still handcuffed throughout the ordeal) while female officers stripped her naked and searched her over her screams of protest. After this sadistic sexual assault, they left her locked in her cell, totally naked, without even a blanket to cover herself.

They left her in the cell, sans phone calls or medical attention or even clothing, for six hours.

Oh, and one of their number went ahead and videotaped the entire thing. I doubt they expected the backlash that'd occur when the local news media got a hold of what parts of it are still available.

Warning: Do not watch the videos if you're easily triggered. Or not easily triggered. Or prone to violent rages and/or bouts of internet stalking.

Video 1 (Removed by Youtube) Video 1
Video 2 (Removed by Youtube) Video 2


Maybe Steffey was freaking out beforehand. Maybe not. But when the news brings us tales of police assault and prison rape and the story of that poor guy who was sodomized by cops with a toilet plunger, I dare you to find a person of any gender who would not flip the fuck out if they were handcuffed and pinned face-down by multiple people who proceeded to strip them, pants-first, without a single word of reassurance or explanation.

This is a sexual assault and human rights violation, sanctioned and condoned by the people who are supposed to be protecting us.

Some people don't get it, and try to justify the officers' actions because of what we don't see or because Steffey was freaking out. But the math is still simple. The second video shows eight cops altogether, some following along, one recording the entire process, and the rest leading Hope Steffey down the hallway. The majority are women. If Steffey was really out of control, you can't tell me that they wouldn't have enough people to just cuff her hand & foot to something solid and have someone sit with her, either until she calmed down or until they got proper mental health specialists on hand. There was absolutely no reason to hold her down and forcibly strip her, no reason whatsoever for the group to be mixed-gender, and even less of a reason to leave her alone for that long afterwards--especially if their intention was truly to keep her from self-harm.



Fucking Christ. And then people wonder why no one takes cops seriously. Between this and the drug enforcement people gunning down an innocent mother holding her child and the cops dumping the quadriplegic out of his wheelchair and that cock choking and throwing a fourteen year old kid onto the ground for skateboarding and saying "Dude," it's a wonder we aren't already neck-deep in riots.



The question remains: What's to stop people from taking matters into their own hands when calling for the authorities may result in something like this? I know I'm likely to think twice.