The guy's screaming "Dad! Dad! Dad!" ... that breaks my heart.

One bystander wisely asks "How do you resist when they're on top of your back?" and then wonders why they don't just put the cuffs on him and be done with it. That's a common theme I've noticed with these incidents: the assailants keep saying "stop resisting! stop resisting!" But I imagine it's kind of hard to stop struggling and moving around when you're terrified, in excruciating pain, and being crushed with body weight like that.

Wrongful and unwarranted arrest is bad enough, but this sadistic torture and power-play brutality has got to stop.

Oh and get this:

http://www.cityoffullerton.com/civica/press/display.asp?layo...

Would you go forward if you were a witness?

>One bystander wisely asks "How do you resist when they're on top of your back?

Convulsions from multiple tazering and hits into the head and spine. It is a catch-22 for the victim - police tazers you, you convulse, ie. resist, thus giving them plausible cause to tazer you more and/or in this particular case to hit your head, neck into the curb, etc... when they hit your head (or kidneys - they professionally trained and very experienced in how to hit you) the brain and spine nervous tissue shock make you convulse, ie. resist, ... loop continues.

Right, well put ... and to the bystander's credit, he was asking the question rhetorically. But you're right: basically your own death throes become "resistance".

And to answer my own question: I'd like to think I'd step forward as a witness, even though it might mean a few years of harassment.

Sickening.

More sickening still: many people's reaction to this magnitude of brutality (or, actually, to any magnitude of law enforcement's abuse of power) is to rationalize it by saying that the victim was "a criminal".

The unstated logic behind this argument is that, by breaking the law, you forfeit all rights. Poppycock: Nuremberg trials.

(And yes, it is true that the victim is often not, in fact, a criminal. But that has no bearing on whether this sort of treatment should be tolerated.)

The man in the video, Kelly Thomas, was beaten so severely by police that he went into a coma. The pictures are heart-wrenching ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Thomas_(beating_victim) )

He died three days later from the beating. Even after he was handcuffed, the officers beat him repeatedly with flashlights and the butt of their tasers. Just tragic.

This has caused quite a stir here in SoCal. The Fullerton PD is now under investigation by the FBI, the officers in the video are in hiding due to death threats, and three of the city council members are being targeted for recall.