Cops etc.

In today's NY Times [behind subscription wall], Bob Herbert's column details how New York policemen routinely rough up, fondle, and otherwise molest New York's public school children, even as the teachers and administrators complain.

Students are being belittled, shouted at, cursed at, intrusively searched and improperly touched by cops and security aides who answer to the Police Department, not school authorities. In many cases, the students are roughed up, handcuffed, arrested and taken off to jail for behavior that does not even begin to approach the criminal. Teachers and administrators who have attempted to intervene on the behalf of students have themselves been abused, and in some cases arrested.

This poisonous police behavior is an extension into the schools of the humiliating treatment cops have long been doling out to youngsters — especially those who are black or Latino — on the city’s streets.

This kind of stuff has been going on for years. When I was a teenager, fifty plus years ago, a French exchange student who was living with me and I went to see a boxing match at the now defunct Cincinnati Gardens. Someone seated near us threw something into the ring, and the cops descended on the two of us, forcibly removed us from the arena, and them pummelled us to the ground outside before disappearing back into the arena. No explanations. No opportunity for us to protest our innocence. Nothing.

Why is it that so many cops seem to take delight in beating up helpless citizens?

Maybe we should ask Dick Cheney. He seems to have the same mentality.