Please Don’t Let This Be True…

Just what newly-minted BPD Chief Martin needed- a police scandal to kick off the new year. According to reports, 2 young african-american men were walking down the sidewalk on their way to Taco Bell when they were harassed, wrongfully detained, and even beaten by multiple members of the BPD. At least that’s the story from the victims. And we know this much- one of these kids was beaten badly enough to require quite a few stitches, in addition to baton wounds to his lower body. And the charges they were arrested on? A couple of obscure vehicle code violations involving walking in the street- which the victims say is also false, as they were on the sidewalk. I for one really, really hope that there’s more to this story- something that explains all this in a way that is favorable to the officers involved. Otherwise, we’ll kick off 2017 with a ton of bad press, more investigations by the state (or maybe even the feds), and yet another extremely expensive lawsuit against the city, which we tend to lose. We know that the NAACP is already up in arms over the incident.  I’ll wait ’til I get all the details, but damn…