The long story makes it even worse. The cops were responding to a 911 call for a white man who was causing a big problem. They got there and talked to that person, and that person said that the black man across the street started it, or some such story. For reasons unknown (racism? lunacy?) the cops decided to take the word of the actual suspect, who would obviously lie to avoid getting in trouble.

Then the cops lied on the police report. They said the victim had resisted, but they didn’t give him time to resist before beating him. They attacked him less than a second after getting out of their car. Even if he had been able to hear, he would have still been beaten down. In the police report, they say he attacked them, but a quick view of the video proves it’s the opposite.

Yes, there are theoretical situations where cops need to use force right away, but the facts here don’t support it. A he-said-she-said situation where nobody is armed or fighting or running away, that’s a quick legal analysis. And even if hypothetically there were justification, they lied on the police report, which only shows that they knew it was wrong.

And after beating him down, and after his girlfriend explaining that he’s deaf, the cops still spoke as if he could understand them, and they refused to let the girlfriend use sign language to establish basic communication. To me, this last point feels worse than everything else. They simply refused to see him, or his girlfriend, as human beings that ought to be treated with any kind of basic respect.