African American teenager arrested by nine California police officers for jaywalking

This video from the USA says about itself:

8 September 2015

Nine police officers arrest an unarmed black teenager in California for allegedly trespassing in a bus-only lane … in Stockton, California. YouTube user Edward Avendaño posted the video and said in a Facebook post that the officer tried to stop the teenager, who kept walking to his bus. The teen was held in custody and released to his mother pending a charge in juvenile court of resisting arrest and trespassing.

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Black teenager arrested by nine California police officers after ‘jaywalking’

Video shows unarmed teenager forced to ground by group of Stockton police officers after allegedly walking in a bus lane

Nine police officers arrested an unarmed black teenager in California after he allegedly jaywalked and then scuffled with an officer.

A video of the incident shows the officers surrounding the 16-year-old African American and forcing him to the ground after he got into an altercation with an officer who accused him of walking in a bus-only lane.

The incident happened in the city of Stockton, 80 miles (130km) east of San Francisco, on Wednesday morning. A cellphone video uploaded to Facebook and YouTube by a passerby has been viewed more than 10,000 times.

It shows an officer using his baton to push and hold the boy, wearing shorts, on a landscaped perimeter on the sidewalk.

They scuffle, the boy yelling “get the fuck off me” and the officer shouting “stop resisting arrest”. The officer strikes him in the face and orders him to the ground but the boy does not comply.

An unseen female bystander shouts in protest: “That’s a fucking kid! Don’t touch him, leave him alone! That’s a kid. Are you serious? He didn’t do nothing wrong.”

The officer retrieves from the ground what appears to be a body camera knocked off during the scuffle.

Several patrol cars arrive and four officers force the boy to the ground, handcuff him and march him to a car while colleagues mill around them. The protester’s voice rises in anger and disbelief: “That is a child! That is child that was jaywalking! That’s a fucking child! What’s wrong with y’all?”

YouTube user Edward Avendaño posted the video under the username Stockton Port City. In a Facebook post he said the officer tried to stop the teenager for jaywalking and ordered him to sit but the teen kept walking to his bus.

“The cop kept grabbing his arm & the kid took the cop’s hand off his arm so the cop took out his baton & that’s when I started recording because everything happened too quick. He didn’t have to hit the kid with the baton & no need to call about 20 cops.”

This, by the way, is not the first time that some police officer gets hysterical about the horrible crime of jaywalking; as this Spanish British history professor, attending a congress in the USA, can tell.

I must confess something. I have committed the heinous crime of jaywalking myself. When? In the 1980s. Where? In Prague; today in the Czech republic, then in Czechoslovakia.

If police react so violently to jaywalking in the USA, ‘the land of the free’, just imagine what would happen in then communist party-ruled Czechoslovakia. Ronald Reagan, then president of ‘the land of the free’ used to call these East European states ‘the evil empire’.

A Czech policeman saw me jaywalking. Did he kill me? Did he send me to a concentration camp?

The policeman said: ‘You should cross the street this way. Not that way’. And that was it.

Maybe police in California might learn from that, thirty years later?

Indeed, some things were very seriously wrong in 1980s Czechoslovakia. I was in Prague then as a guest of people who had been sacked for being political dissidents. However, establishment politicians and corporate media in NATO countries depicted real wrongs plus invented wrongs in eastern Europe as a contrasting background for their claims of how free western countries supposedly were.

‘IN MY HEART, I KNOW MY BROTHER DID NOT KILL HIMSELF’ “Michael Paul was arrested for jaywalking [in the USA] and died in custody. His family wants to know why.” [HuffPost]

A video showing a Sacramento police officer beating a man for allegedly illegally crossing the street, or “jaywalking,” was recorded by a witness on her cellphone earlier this week. The video has since gone viral on social media and has prompted a criminal investigation from the Sacramento Police Department: here.