Public Trust in Police is Already Dead, But Let's Keep Hitting Just to Make Sure

As you may have heard, riots in Philadelphia are burning up the city following an incident where police shot a guy holding a knife. I'm not going to rehash the details of that specific case, instead I'd like to turn to an incident in the aftermath.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, tweeted a touching photo of an extremely photogenic female police officer clutching a black baby who is hugging her. Her face is bathed in street light and emergency lights. The caption read: “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

A bit cheesy, sure, but nevertheless I genuinely believe it's important to highlight the good work that police do.

But then, of course, video emerged. And it's amazing.

According to the attorney of the barefoot boy and his mom, and backed up by video, here's what happened:

Not long after midnight on Tuesday, Rickia Young, a 28-year-old home health aide, borrowed her sister’s car, put her 2-year-old son in the back seat and drove across town to West Philadelphia to pick up her teenage nephew from a friend’s house, Mincey said.

She was driving back to their home, hoping the purring car engine would lull her young son to sleep, when she turned onto Chestnut Street, where police and protesters had collided. She found herself unexpectedly driving toward a line of police officers who told her to turn around, Mincey said. The young mother tried to make a three-point turn when a swarm of Philadelphia officers surrounded the SUV, shattered its windows and pulled Young and her 16-year-old nephew from the car, the video shows.

A now-viral video of the confrontation shows officers throw Young and the teenager to the ground and then grab the toddler from the back seat. The scene was captured by Aapril Rice, who watched it unfold from her rooftop and told the Philadelphia Inquirer that watching a police officer take the baby was “surreal” and “traumatic.”

Mincey said police temporarily detained Young, who had to be taken to the hospital for medical treatment before she could be processed at the police station because her head was bleeding and most of her left side had been badly bruised when police threw her to the ground. She and her son were separated for hours, he said.

“Her face was bloodied and she looked like she had been beaten by a bunch of people on the street,” he told The Post. “She is still in pain.”

Her nephew also suffered injuries in the confrontation, Mincey said, and Young’s son was hit in the head leaving a large bump on the toddler’s forehead.

Mincey said Young phoned her mother while in police custody and asked her to find the boy. The toddler’s grandmother managed to find him after several hours, the lawyer said, sitting in his car seat in the back of a police cruiser with two officers in the front seats. Glass from the SUV’s broken windows still lay in the child’s car seat, he said.

The FOP of course deleted its tweet, but declined to comment any further. Nothing from Philly PD except that they've "opened an investigation".

I've written before how I think the issue animating anti-police protests is a breakdown in trust. With that in mind, it's really difficult to envision a worse kind of response from the police this summer across the entire country. The most innocent explanation for this particular incident is that someone snapped the photo and it ended up at FOP's hands without any further context besides an echo of a game of telephone. The damning explanation is that they knowingly just made shit up with the hope or anticipation that they wouldn't get caught.

Place yourself in the shoes of Rickia Young. Cops surround your car and start smashing windows while your 2-year-old son is in the backseat. They then drag your ass out of your car and you're thrown to the ground. You're now in handcuffs, and have no idea where your son is. What would it take for you to trust law enforcement again? To add another wrinkle, what if there was never any video? How would you convince the public what happened? How would you avoid getting tarred as a derelict mother who abandoned her barefoot son in the middle of a riot?

If you think that's a nightmare scenario, what reforms would you propose to fix it?