City Councilman's Daughter Tased in Back While on Her Knees

According to African American Political Pundit's Tasered While Black blog,

Cincinnati police arrested and used a Taser on Celeste Thomas, the daughter of Cincinnati city councilman Cecil Thomas, early Sunday morning.

Her arrest report indicates that Thomas had marks on her upper back from the Taser's barbs.

"It is my understanding that she was on her knees when she was Tased in the back," said Cecil Thomas.

The Pundit's report says that the same officer was removed from the force earlier after it was determined that he used excessive force, but was reinstated a year later, after arbitration.

If your skin is brown and you live in the United States, it doesn't matter that your father is an elected city councilor, representing your community as a member of local government. When police pull your car over in the dark, your just another "N" word to them.


And Lord forbid a Black person should ask a police officer, "What's going on?" Remember, you're Black. You don't have any right to know what's going on with the person with whom you were riding in your car moments earlier. If you ask, "What's going on?" you are effectively saying that there is at least the hypothetical possibility that police are mistreating another Black person. Since, in the minds of police, all Blacks are to be mistreated, they can only understand your question as an act of rebeliousnes - rebelious as a slave who refuses to work for free, under the hot sun.

Do not doubt or question the "hot sun" of the USA's extremely color-aroused police attrocities.

Don't ask police, "What's going on?" If you're Black you have no right to know. Instead, look out of the window of your car (carefully so the police won't know you're observing them), and later read the testilying police report later to find out what the police say was going on.

There are two more immediate alternatives, and those are "self defense" and "defense of another". Remember, you have no right to run over a police officer with your car, unless a jury decides subsequently that you reasonably feared for the life of another and that the force you used was reasonable in light of the circumstances you observed.

You have no right to run out of a watching crowd, kick a police officer in the ass, and run back into the crowd, unless a a jury decides subsequently that you reasonably feared for the physical safety of another and that the force you used was reasonable in light of the circumstances you observed. *

You certainly have no right to discover a police officers home address and then take extra-judicial action there, in the way that police took extra-judicial pretrial action in the case of Esteban Carpio. That would be unlawful, and Lord knows the laws in the United States effectively protect everyone, including the Blacks who unreasonably conclude, based on their experience with police, that "a Black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect."

And yet, it seems that Esteban Carpio may have taken action against police torture before most of it occurred, rather than afterward.

Blacks in South Africa only began to realize their rights as human beings when they abandoned efforts to orally convince white Afrikkaners, and the African National Congress engaged in an armed struggle for Black rights. They didn't announce that they were armed and ready to struggle, like the Black Panthers did, with public local offices in most major Black US cities.

Instead the African National Congress was a clandestine operation whose armed actions became public knowledge only when they occurred, and not before.

I was upset by members of the Black majority in South Africa who put tires around informants and burned them in public. But, it was part of the armed struggle and obviously Black South Africans knew a lot more about armed struggle than Black people in the United States ever did. Who can gainsay, in retrospect, what was necessary and constructive and what was not?

*Nothing written here is legal advice. You're right to physically defend yourself from police depends upon the statutes and caselaw in your state, as well as whether you are tried before an all-white jury, as Esteban Carpio was, even though the city in which he was tried is half white and half Black and Latino. You should consult a criminal defense lawyer and a public relations specialist in your own state to assess the limits of your right to self-defense and defense of another when you are defending yourself or someone else from police atrocities.