After an elderly protester in Buffalo, New York, was pushed to the ground by police officers and left to lie there as blood pooled beneath his head, the head of the local police union, John Evans, said his colleagues were disgusted.
Disgusted, that is, that two of the officers seen in the video were suspended without pay.
“Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” Evans told the Buffalo NBC affiliate WGRZ, offering a classic Nuremberg defense. The officers remain employed; they have simply resigned from the riot team that was deployed to clear the city’s Niagara Square of residents protesting police abuse.
The Buffalo Emergency Response Team was formed in the aftermath of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. For many Americans, the heavy-handed police response and the riots and unrest that followed raised questions about the wisdom of outfitting police departments with military equipment. But police leadership in Buffalo took the protests as a sign that they needed a specialized team to deal with “mass demonstrations.”
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“There’s a very fine line between policing and honoring people’s civil rights,” the team’s commander told WIVB at the time. “I just want compliance, that’s the name of the game.” Everything about this incident feels like it was authored by a hack fiction writer pushing a metaphor too far, but yes: A riot squad created to subdue Black Lives Matter protesters is now most famous for pushing an unarmed, elderly white man to the ground.