James Finn
2 min readOct 5, 2024

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There's a huge movement on YouTube of grass-rootsl activists publishing relatively unknown body cam videos of police brutality.

Just last night, I watched a video of cops brutally attacking a man who is having an epileptic seizure, because he fell down and one of his arms unintentionally struck a paramedic who was there to help him.

The cop lost it. He yelled and screamed at the man having an epileptic seizure, telling him to keep his hands off the medics.

He tackled the man having the seizure. Several cops then held him face down come up with his face in a pillow, with their knees and feet on his head and body.

The man had had epileptic seizures earlier in the day, and his grandmother called 911 looking for medics not cops.

She hovered over the cops as they held the struggling patient down, asking them to be gentle and not to hurt him. Eventually, she had to ask them to please take his pulse, because she could tell something was wrong with him.

Something was definitely wrong with him. He was dead. They killed him. Because he fell down and unintentionally struck a paramedic in the process.

The other night, I watched the video of cops killing a homeless man. He hadn't committed any crimes, but they didn't like that he was in a public park, and they threw him headfirst into pavement.

He broke his neck. They stood around laughing and joking for 30 minutes waiting for an ambulance, and telling the man he was going to be fine.

He wasn't fine. They turned him into a quadriplegic. When the ambulance finally arrived to take him to the hospital, he was admitted and never released.

He died as a direct result of the injuries the cops inflicted on him.

I could go on and on.

Cop culture in the United States is out of control. Cops will beat you and even kill you at the drop of a pin.

Oh, both of those incidents above? The police departments in question investigated themselves and determined that they had done nothing wrong. Seriously.

People of color are especially at risk for police brutality because of how the system responds to people of color. But out-of-control police brutality is not limited to people of color.

Everyone in the United States is at risk from out-of-control cops and their routinely brutal culture.

We desperately need reform.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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