If you were looking for a single video that best encapsulated why so many people the world over feel an ever-increasing disdain for police, then this clusterf*ck out of the US might be for you.
The story begins with a June 2024 complaint from a woman named Katherine Jensen to the local police department in College Park, a small city on the fringes of Atlanta, Georgia.
Police bodycam footage of the incident reveals Jensen alleging that a man named Charles Read, her ex-boyfriend, assaulted her.
Ms Jensen tells police: “He kicked in the [front]door. I ran. He choked me out…” According to Ms Jensen, Mr Read then allegedly tried to steal Jensen’s car keys, before he “took off on foot” from her house.
The only problem? Charles Read is a paraplegic, and has been in a wheelchair for 25 years.
It gets worse.
Ms Jensen and Mr Read did, in fact, date for a short time… more than two decades earlier. Which is the last time Mr Read actually saw Ms Jensen.
None of that, along with the fact Ms Jensen actually told police she didn’t want to press charges, stopped officers from gaining an arrest warrant for Mr Read.
Then they tricked Mr Read into presenting at the College Park Police Department (ostensibly for the purposes of “clearing up a case of mistaken identity”.
Then they handcuffed him in the foyer of the police station, and knocked him out of his wheelchair (caught on bodycam) because they didn’t believe he was a real paraplegic.
Then they spirited him off to the County Jail after repeated attempts by Mr Read to prove his innocence failed.
Footage shows a black police officer intervening to question the arrest, and later interrupting the lunch of his superior, a lieutenant, to try and get him to also intervene and restore some sort of sanity to proceedings.
Unfortunately, sanity lost.
The reply from the lieutenant, who doesn’t even bother to get up from his desk, is straight out of central casting: “It’s a ruse man. I mean, it’s an obvious attempt to not go to jail.”
Or maybe it’s a man in a wheelchair being accused of spousal abuse by a woman who is essentially a total stranger, albeit one with a horse loose in the top paddock. And in case you haven’t already worked it out… it’s the latter.
Or in the words of Read’s attorney, Andrew Fleischman, “I’ve never seen a case where someone was so clearly innocent, and it would take so little work to establish it, and nobody was willing to do the work.”
The video of the arrest, with an analysis, is featured on the Youtube channel of The Civil Rights Lawyer, aka John H. Bryan, of West Virginia, who posts daily content focused on the rich vein of bodycam videos (and ensuing lawsuits) of US police committing all sorts of policy violations, misdemeanours and felonies.
By social media standards, Bryan’s account is relatively new (launched in 2020), but he’s already approaching almost two million subscribers, and three quarters of a billion views on almost 900 videos. Well worth a follow if you’re interested in civil rights, constitutional issues (albeit American ones) and analysis of the routine breaches by governments and police departments.
Donate To New Matilda
New Matilda is a small, independent media outlet. We survive through reader contributions, and never losing a lawsuit. If you got something from this article, giving something back helps us to continue speaking truth to power. Every little bit counts.
