But some measure of justice has been exacted. The victim of this thug scrum was just awarded $250k – unfortunately, it comes out of taxpayers’ pockets, not the pockets of the buzz-cut brigade:
A pregnant woman who was pulled over for talking on her cellphone — and then hurled to the ground and hogtied by CHP officers on the shoulder of the busy Harbor Freeway — has been paid $250,000 in damages.
The 30-year-old woman was charged with resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license, but the charges were dropped after a judge was shown a video of the incident, captured on a camera mounted on the dashboard of a California Highway Patrol cruiser.
“The conduct here is outrageous. What these officers did here was bewildering to me. They knew she was pregnant,” said Howard Price, the attorney for Tamara Gaglione. “She never resisted arrest.”
The eight-minute video of the August 2011 incident shows a CHP officer tailing Gaglione on the 110 Freeway, with the Los Angeles skyline looming in the distance.
Once she pulls to the shoulder, after first pulling into the fast lane and appearing to cut off other drivers, a pair of CHP officers orders her to toss out her car keys, get out of her dark green Dodge Caravan and put her hands on the vehicle.
Instead, the video shows, she stands and stares at the patrolmen, appearing confused. Officers, in their official report, said she appeared to raise her arms in a menacing manner.
The action caught on the video picks up quickly from there:
Guns drawn, the officers approach the driver, and one of the patrolmen sweeps away her legs with a kick and pushes her face-first to the asphalt. Another officer then presses his knee into the woman’s back and pins her to the ground.
At another point, it appears the woman is kicked in her left ribs. Eventually she is hogtied and placed in a squad car.
“I’d never seen a gun for real before,” Gaglione said later. “I just froze. I was scared they’d shoot me.”
Gaglione said she told the officers she was pregnant when they first approached her, but Officer Daniel Hernandez — one of the initial officers on the scene — said she didn’t mention that until she was on the ground.
Hernandez said in his report that he kneed the woman in an effort to distract her so that his partner, Officer Roberto Martinez, could handcuff her.
In their report, the officers said the incident had escalated because the woman had ignored their orders and appeared to raise her arms in an aggressive manner after hopping out of the van.
Based on the report, Gaglione was charged by the Los Angeles city attorney with misdemeanor evading and resisting arrest and driving on a suspended license.
After the charges were dismissed, Gaglione pleaded no contest to a simple infraction of using her cellphone while driving. Gaglione and her attorney said the judge questioned the actions of the officers after watching the video.
CHP officials declined to discuss the incident, saying only that both sides concluded that settling the lawsuit for $250,000 was in the best interest of everyone.
Act foolishly and expect to get treated in kind. These officers never know when someone will take deadly actions, it is a different world today. Just grow up.
Interesting perspective. By that definition of “grow up” we should expect to be treated as serious criminals for technical fouls?
Wow! Glad to meet you Bob; I wasn’t aware there were any surviving castrati from the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
Welcome.
So your advice to pregnant women is to cower in submission as police trample their rights, so they don’t frighten the “officers” into beating them to a pulp? Is that the theme?
How about this:
THEY are OUR SERVANTS, Bob. If they’re so terrified of everything that goes “boo!”, perhaps they’re in the wrong line of work. Or are you just projecting?
A cop’s job is not even in the top ten most dangerous jobs; if you want real terror, try being a fisherman. Or a construction worker–those guys face REAL danger. Not pregnant women with attitude.
And their jobs get steadily LESS dangerous with each passing year; crime’s down 20% in the last 20 years, gun crime’s down 49% in the same time.
No, Bob, the cops need to re-learn an important lesson: they work for us, and it is their first duty to protect OUR security…not THEIRS.
I will leave you with a quote from one of the founding fathers:
Dear Bob,
Yeah, “officer safety” uber alles.
Ya know?
Bob says:
Der Führer ist mein Hirte. Ich brauche nicht zu denken.
Not me.
I will follow GewaltFreiheit (GewaltLosigkeit)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewaltlosigkeit
Gewalt=violence Freiheit=freedom Losigkeit=”lessness”
A future world without Bobs?
Kleelosigkeit – cloverlessness
Kleefreiheit – freedom from clovers
“A future world without Bobs?”
Too funny!
What About Bob – I’m Sailing
So, Bob –
It’s ok to physically beat down a clearly non-physically-threatening and much smaller woman… over a traffic infraction?
Would you feel the same way if this had been your daughter or wife? That they got what they deserved?
Do you also support roadside execution for arguing over the propriety of seatbelt laws?
You’re correct Bob, people just need to “grow up” and be good obedient slaves if they don’t want to get hurt. I hear that all so frequently in response to my views. That I need to “grow up” and just obey my masters without question.
What I don’t understand is how this term “grow up” means to obey one’s betters, one’s masters, one’s parents as it were. That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. How is this idealized child-like behavior considered to be grown up?
Now maybe I am confused because I was a child in the 1970s and 80s. A time where children were told to obey their parents but that once they were adults they could make their own decisions and be treated by like adults. Thus I feel ripped off too. See I was good obedient child and waited for my time to be an adult where I could make my own decisions and be treated like an adult. However, now that I am an adult, most everyone tells me to ‘grow up’ and obey my new parents, the government employees, and still not make my own decisions and be treated like an adult.
See Bob, I’m not the perfect slave. I’m a malcontent because I bought into the bullshit that when I reached adulthood I would be a free man. Instead, I find my freedom as George Carlin put it is to choose “paper or plastic”. What I am suppose to be according to folks like yourself, is even more child like than when I was child. That I am supposed to cover my mouth and curb my curiosity. To learn only what I am supposed to learn. Say only what I am supposed to say. To produce and obey. To be a good slave.
And that’s what this woman’s offense was, she wasn’t a good slave. She didn’t immediately obey. She apparently thought she was a free adult and expected to be treated like one. But we aren’t ever going to be free adults. Just slaves. Children of the government and corporations that are there to care for us.
I think I’d rather be six years old in the 1970s. It felt far more free than being an adult in the early 21st century.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or gets the hose again:
BrentP, you just have a bad attitude….like me. I grew up in the fifties and by the time I was 12 I knew fairly much how it all played out. One day my parents were speaking of my college education and how I’d get it(financially) and how I might not(we weren’t well to do). I told them not to worry as I had a couple of back up plans. Now I wasn’t a smartass to my parents and didn’t back talk them so they were listening. We’d had several family friends I’d seen get screwed over and then get religion or the ones that were just simply incompetent and finally got a job as a cop. I told them if nothing else, I’d become a Baptist preacher or a cop. They were slack jawed at this revelation although I think my dad might have thought I was right on. My mom chastised me and then I told them whey I thought that way, enumerating the things I’d seen and people I’d known, all friends of theirs. They just sat and thought about it although my mom didn’t want to give in on the preacher until I gave her examples. My dad, a very kind man, a very competent man, had no use for cops of any sort. He was deferential to them to a point and them he could get really PO’d and tell them what he thought of them. It took a great deal to get him to that point. I reiterated that point later in life and while my mom would laugh, my dad would just sit there and suck it up and know I was right and if it hadn’t been for mom, he’d probably have jumped on the bandwagon with me. Men just don’t care to be abused by anyone, especially their inferiors.
bad attitude… ha. I know that well.
Brent,
That was excellently said – thank you!
” Just grow up.”
Just suck my dick, Porky.
I wouldn’t even let him do that!
Eeeeewww…cooties!
Danielle Maudsley
http://opnateye.com/?p=158
I really have run out of things to say about cops like these. Talking doesn’t soothe my feelings any more.
Der Tag Kommt.
Ja. Sehr bald.
Sind wir schon da?
Noch nicht. Der Tag Kommt.
Achtung Biergarten Dummköpfen:
Freibier jetzt und Revolution morgen!
Ich trinke entweder in Frieden oder Sie werden in Stücke sterben!
Dear Tor,
My German is improving.
I didn’t even need to use Google Translate to understand “Biergarten Dummköpfen.”
“the judge questioned the actions of the officers…” Uhhhh…, fuckin A there sport. Only a lunatic does as much. And obviously the CHP doesn’t want more of this sort of attention directed towards its goose-stepping goons who put their boots on baby-momma. No doubt we’ll hear about “more training” from the rank and file sycophants and the police union.
And it all started out over a sail fawn violation. But of course, the real “crime” was not immediate, abject submission to dey athoritay.
I really don’t want to be harsh, but she was clueless. Her driving behavior and how she behaved at the stop showed she had no clue of what sort of country we live in today. I think her behavior shows she thought she was one of the “good people” that such things don’t happen to.
This isn’t to blame her or to take blame away from the cops. It’s just that if people were awake things wouldn’t be like this in the first place. When I see or read of the bad things happening to the sympathetic characters I just wonder where they and all the people who think it was an outrage in the general population (not us libertarian kooks of course 😉 ) were when this started against less sympathetic characters.
Hi Brent,
Agreed she acted foolishly – and her driving was both obnoxious and atrocious. But the level of force directed her way was absolutely disproportionate. She looked like she maybe weighed 120. Obviously non-threatening. No major crime committed or even suspected. A fucking traffic stop!
And for this, she not only has guns pointed at her but gets slammed to the pavement and kicked by two costumed thugs who probably outweighed her by 100 pounds each.
Was it even necessary to draw guns on this woman?
She drove badly, but it appeared that the others let her do it, made way for her… but my point was she didn’t show the immediate obedience to the cops. She acted like someone who thought it wouldn’t happen to them.
I learned pretty early on to pull over immediately or else. I learned that the adult world wouldn’t be much different for me than the government school world. So I always pull over immediately and I don’t care how unsafe it is for the cop. If he lights me up where his ass is going to be hanging out in to traffic, then so be it. Too many cops want immediate submission or they get angry. If the cop wants me to go somewhere else he’ll say so.
She’s trying to figure out what the cop wants her to do trying to find a safe place…. she’s acting like someone who believes that the cops are there for the bad people not her. Someone who believes the crap about finding safe place to pull over that the cops spew forth after some fake cop rapes and murders some woman. Someone who doesn’t understand the reality of cop mentality but still believes in the image of the friendly policeman.
Meanwhile the cop is probably just getting more and more angry because she just doesn’t show the immediate submissive behavior he wanted to see. Given what’s on the video, the cops words over the loudspeaker early on, my guess is if she had just shown submission and put down the phone she wouldn’t even have gotten a ticket.
The reason for such a takedown was because she didn’t behave submissively. It’s how things are now. I’m not blaming her or anything else, just my observations with the benefit of my own experiences. It’s just me watching this video as though it were a clip from Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom.
Agreed –
Dear Brent,
It’s just me watching this video as though it were a clip from Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom.
As though it were?
Dear Bevin,
I’d say our lives are part Wild Kingdom for the Insurance Conglomerate Reality Shows & Part Brave New World.
Brave New World – Fu11 Movie
Brent, I’d like to see this play out countless times all over the US. Wake up call clueless women and clueless men. I’ve had a mudhole stomped in my ass and it is always a thing you get more perspective on as time goes on. I recommend a session like this for everybody. I’m dead serious. Too bad that’s what it takes for so many to understand it. This actually wasn’t bad at all and it needed to go further, lots of blood, cuts, contusions leaving the victim something to recall it by. Thugs with badges will just get their comeuppance sooner rather than later.
I agree. I’ve feel that the only thing that will wake up a lot of people is to have their own experiences. When they come for clover-americans it could be a turning point.
My experiences were a lot milder than this one and I learned it, so I am not sure its magnitude but rather to get people to understand that these aren’t aberrations. The aberration is the public seeing it.
Which hard hits do you remember most? The big surprise of going down and bouncing back up or the ones where you really thought you were physically hurt? A nice cut and scar on the forehead will remind you every day, especially those hung up on looks. I don’t remember all the hooeys I got riding a bike but remember the one where my teeth went through my lip, couldn’t forget because of the scar. A little blood is a good thing sometimes although a lot of it isn’t. A bit of shock and the realization you didn’t do anything to deserve that are very real to countless people who didn’t have their episode captured on camera. It’s always a he said, they said thing but having that memory of how you’ve been wronged so badly will build a fire.
I’ve avoided physical assault thus far. It’s come close a couple times, but so far jedi mind tricks continue to work for me.
Dear Brent,
Right.
I get what you’re getting at.
It’s a classic case of Martin Niemoller’s belated realization:
“Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Dear Eric, dom,
The connection between foreign aggression and domestic tyranny has long fascinated me.
To wit, “Officer 82nd Airborne.”
He sums up how what “we” do to “them,” i.e., what “our boys in uniform” do to the “gooks” and “camel jockeys” are chickens that come home to roost.
The Framers knew this.
With the benefit of Rothbardian market anarchist hindsight, we know they messed up in many ways.
But they were vastly wiser than the intellectual midgets infesting the Beltway today, two centuries later.
Consider this:
“What has America done for the benefit of mankind?
America… has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own… the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit… “
— John Quincy Adams, 1821
Is this not what has happened?
Have not the fundamental maxims of America’s policy insensibly changed from liberty to force?
Has not America become the dictatress of the world, but no longer the ruler of her own spirit?
These cops are sick fucks and absolute pathetic wastes of skins.