The police in the United States are completely out of control, racist and violent to the point of overt brutality.

The cops who pepper sprayed and beat an active duty Black army officer, video footage of which has been played over and over again in the last 24 hours, are players in just one more in an endless string of examples of brutal racist cops.

Something pops up every single day.

As I commented to somebody else this morning, I’ve handled tasers. I’ve fired 9 mm pistols almost identical to police service weapons.

Know how similar they feel in your hand? Yeah, not similar at all. They have completely different weights, they have completely different grips, and they fire completely differently.

I’m not saying she knew she was firing her service weapon, but I am saying that she acted in a manner that rises to depraved indifference, and she must go to prison for very many years. What she did was heinous.

But what this boils down to is that even firing her taser would have been heinous. It would have been an act of brutality completely uncalled for. She fired at a man constrained in handcuffs who posed no risk to her or anyone else.

A taser strike carries a non-trivial risk of serious injury up to and including death. Officers who fire tasers commit acts of violence. We have to stand up and tell them to stop committing acts of violence. Not wanting to get into a police cruiser is not a crime that deserves any weapon being fired.

If cops can’t figure out how to get a guy in a car who’s already in handcuffs, without firing a weapon at him, well … I’m not going to say what that says about the intelligence and humanity of cops. But it says nothing good.

The woman who killed that Black man in Minneapolis is a brutal violent monster. The American people have to recognize that she is a brutal violent monster, and we must demand that the criminal justice system punish her as a brutal violent monster.

Nothing is going to change until we face up to the police and demand that they stop being brutal violent monsters.

Racism is a big problem, though. Because too many white people are probably quite right to imagine that those violent monsters are never going to direct brutality at them. That’s reserved for Black people. And so it goes on and on and on and on. Every damn day.