An incident occurred on mid-Market two weeks ago in which a one-legged man with crutches was reported, possibly by a nearby business owner, for waving some "sticks" around in the vicinity. Though we do not know what else occurred before the video you can see above, Chaédria LaBouvier documented what took place for Medium, whose offices she said she was headed toward to pitch a project about police brutality when she came upon this scene.
The man does not appear to be directly injured, and he is definitely struggling and resisting arrest for what we do not know. However it does appear true that the man's crutches are taken from him, and that he repeatedly asks why the officers are doing this to him. He was ultimately strapped to a gurney and taken off to SF General, apparently against his will.
But, as LaBouvier, the fact remains that this is a disabled man and for some reason it took 14 cops to take him down, and even if no one was killed we should question how mundane such an incident appears to us.
These incidents are so quotidian, so mundane, that they do not merit a mention in even passing on the local news. Which is to say, this is everyday harassment. Which is to say, that we’ve normalized and habitualized the kind of policing in San Francisco and the rest of America that brutalizes the most vulnerable people, which strips them of their human dignity, the agency to their bodies — to walk with crutches when physically disabled, to have this body unviolated — when in actuality, they are whom the police are especially supposed to be protecting.
Also, she marvels at the proximity of the offices of Twitter and Uber, saying that workers at these companies should be working to figure out how "to use the powers of innovation, access and capital to change the narrative of police brutality in San Francisco and America."
Is this brutality? You be the judge.