The viral video showing a white police officer violently arresting a Black woman is no big deal because it’s from 2018.
Or, at least, that’s what the chief of a police department in Washington State would like for us all to believe after he was forced to issue a defensive mea culpa over the footage of his cop body-slamming a Black woman, twisting and contorting her arm and sitting on top of her head — all in the name of trying to restrain her.
Like the Black woman, Floyd was suspected of a nonviolent crime (using a counterfeit bill) before Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin snatched him out of his car, handcuffed him and applied deadly pressure from his knee to the neck of the 46-year-old man.
To recap, it took the resurfacing of an old video of apparent police brutality (and not Floyd’s egregious, world-affecting police killing) for the Bellevue Police Department to “suspend” chokeholds, sometimes.
Even after seeing it (again) used on the unidentified Black woman along with Garner and Floyd, Mylett still apparently isn’t sure whether there are better ways to restrain unarmed people suspected of nonviolent crimes.
