Police brutality has been on the rise over the last few years. There have been numerous instances being reported through social media and the news.
A 2024 New England Cable News (NECN) article talked about a Vermont police sergeant and how he stopped a man named John Stelzl for not using the crosswalk and jaywalking. He said to Stelzl that he was being detained and the sergeant used aggression by “pushing him into the pavement,” according to the affidavit.
The sergeant as well “pressed the Taser into Stelzl’s lower back.” Stelzl was injured severely and was sent to the hospital. Stelzl ended up being charged as well but later on got the charges by courthouse. Caledonia County dropped because of the sergeant’s behavior.
I find this to be disturbing because it seems a lot of violence occurred over such a small crime of jaywalking. I am concerned about the system and why there were no updates about his employment status. When Stelzl cried out in pain to the sergeant asking, “Why are you doing this?” you would think there would be a sense of compassion coming from the sergeant handling an arrest with more care.
In the second recent incident of police brutality, a sheriff from Franklin County, Vermont kicked a shackled inmate. In the NECN article it stated that, “He was using his foot to push down the shackled inmate to prevent him from falling down.”
I do not understand the sheriff’s thought process when he wanted to push him down. Did the sheriff think that the inmate was going to attack him and wanted to use self-defense? If the inmate was shackled, what made him assume he was going to attack? To me, this seems like an abusive power dynamic because the sheriff is acting out on aggression. Months go by and the sheriff loses his law enforcement certification due to a “simple assault charge.”
Police brutality as a societal issue should not be occurring as frequently as it does. There are many incidents where police brutality is not talked about enough. A case that has stuck with me was the 2014 case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice shot and killed by police for holding a toy gun that police mistook as a real gun.
Another incident of police brutality was the George Floyd case back in 2020 of which an officer put a knee on his neck for committing a minor crime. The officer had used deadly force, that baffles me because nobody deserves to die in a type of harsh treatment like that.
I think the media should cover more police brutality because that’s what gets the attention of the public eye. According to the University of Chicago website, “more than 600 people are killed by law enforcement in the U.S. each year.” This quote should grab the attention of other viewers as it did mine, displaying the cruel and frequent effects of police brutality.
Tamy Jacques can be contacted at
tjacques@kscequinox.com
