Police Intervention Always Makes Things Worse -- Continued

by Will Grigg
Mar. 18, 2013

Last April, a Brooklyn landlady named Karen Brim was mopping the floors in her apartment building when three police officers suddenly materialized in pursuit of several local teenagers. The officers claimed that the teens were trespassers. Brim said that they were guests and were welcome on her property. The police, however, were not. The officers responded by throwing the 42-year-old woman to the floor, shattering her leg. She was taken to a local hospital where she was shackled to a bed and held under armed guard for seventeen days. Brim, who was the victim, was charged with five offenses.

About a month earlier, a Chicago businessman named Bassil Abdelal was robbed at gunpoint. The robbers fled when they learned that the police were on the way. Abdelal experienced a brief – and unwarranted – sense of relief when the police arrived. That reaction was quickly dispelled as the police pumped eleven rounds into the victim’s body. Abdelal survived, was taken to a hospital – where he, too, was handcuffed to his bed. For several days he suffered harassment from police detectives who apparently wanted to cover up the department’s culpable incompetence.

There is no emergency or crisis that will not be made immediately worse once the police get involved.