While the chief admitted that the officer was wrong and suspended him, it'll take more than that to get officers like Ramirez to back down and behave themselves:
According to ABC-7, Hunt and cameraman Ric Dupont were sent out to film a flipped semi on the interstate. They parked on the shoulder of the other side of the road as men in military fatigues were helping pull the driver out of the cab.
At that point, Sgt. Raul Ramirez ordered them to leave. When Hunt persisted in trying to ask the men in fatigues what was going on, Ramirez jumped over the barrier and began yelling, "Get in your truck and move!"
Hunt replied, referring to his cameraman, "He can shoot if he wants to," and Ramirez rushed over and grabbed him.
"Do you want me to arrest you?" Ramirez yelled. "I'm telling you something. I'm giving you an order."
An increasingly angry Ramirez twisted Hunt's arm behind his back, as Hunt objected, "I'm not doing anything. I haven't done a thing. I'm just trying to leave."
Ramirez handcuffed Hunt and pushed him against a chain-link fence, then handcuffed the cameraman as well. Both men were taken to the Westside Regional Command Center but were quickly released.
The only way that the nation will be forced to deal with situations like this is when someone gets recorded being treated like Hunt, but then hauls off and beats the hell out of the cop in self-defense. It'll have to be equal parts "Minuteman" and "Rodney King" to get the public's attention and to make the public so pissed off that the government has to explain why a man is being arrested and prosecuted for defending himself against a thug cop who is arresting someone who he has neither a good reason nor authority to arrest in that situation. It'd have to be someone that the middle class could easily identify with, such as a father whose family is getting badly mistreated.
On the otherhand, the mainstream media likes to tow the provocateur line, setting the public off against the police when it is in the interest of the media in cases like this, and then protecting its relationship with the government by destracting the public from actual serious issues regarding government malfeasance (especially of the local variety). My guess is that such an incident would have to be recorded on a HD camcorder, and then published on YouTube for it to really get out there.
Of course, if the police would just treat their own like anyone else, most of these situations would just be footnotes in the newspapers ("Cop tasers 74 year old woman too much; police chief fires cop for excessive, illegal use of force pending review by district attorney.") and the public wouldn't have a reason to care.
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