12mo ago

Manchester Airport: Police filmed stamping and kicking man's head

A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport.

The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport's Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog.

Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.

142 comments

How can we fight back against the police, when they never face consequences, but we do?
- How can we fight back against the police, when they never face consequences, but we do?
  
  They just have to not reach for pots of boiling water after threatening to use it as a weapon.
  That's eems reasonable..
- Just for context, this is in the UK so the officer WILL be prosecuted and punished accordingly.
  It is worth noting that other officers at the scene had a broken nose and other injuries before this happened. It doesn't excuse what he does but there's certainly a lot more to the story here.
  
  I’m from the UK, and I can’t agree. Most likely, at worst, he will be dismissed from the police force. It is very rare for police constables to face criminal charges, and even rarer for those charges to actually stick.
  Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man, was reading the newspaper on the London Underground. The metropolitan police shot him in the head seven times. No officer was held accountable.
  Ian Tomlinson, a newsagent, was walking home past a protest. The metropolitan police beat him to death. A constable lost his job, but was found not guilty by the court.
  A little kid with mental health issues went up to a metropolitan police constable to ask for help. The cop pepper sprayed and beat the child 30 times with a baton. He was dismissed from the police force, but did not face criminal charges.
  And you claim that the officer responsible for this is “fucked”? Dream on. At worst he’ll have to get a real job like the rest of us.
  
  But will they really?
  Here in Aus at least, 3 cops assaulted an autistic or downs guy in his yard one day. The court ordered them to apologise to the victim and do some bullshit “training”.
  
  To be fair, while he will see more consequences than would be likely if this had happened in the US, it's still pretty rare for police officers to be successfully prosecuted in the UK. More likely we'll be looking at an IOPC investigation and internal disciplinary procedures rather than criminal prosecution.
  
  Woah there nelly. That be bringing any of that "logic" and "real world understanding" here
- Oh we will be. There is video evidence they can't really get out of this one.
  What they never really need to do is stop hiring criminals. And when there are warning signs (there are always warning signs, this is never their first offense), they need to be fired, immediately.
  
  If they lose their job, but otherwise don’t suffer any repercussions, would that shock you? What would you propose that we should do, if we can’t get justice through the system?
- How can we fight back against the police, when they never face consequences, but we do?
  Mavics with homemade grenades.
  Molotov cocktails (can be dropped from copters too).
  Also longbows and crossbows with arrows, rock-solid time-proven tech.
  You just have to drop this part
  when they never face consequences, but we do?
  because something like this exists in every conflict. The defending side usually gets punished for the resistance alone.
- No one can hold you accountable if you overrun all the cops.
  
  Just once, I want to see a video where the cops are beating on someone and the crowd actually intervenes and turns the table on them.
  I would love it if we could make the police feel afraid to do this shit. Not scared of losing their job or having to do paperwork, but scared of the actual people there on the street. Scared that they might not have the monopoly on violence that they thought they did.
- Maybe actually train them? In Quebec it takes 3½ years in school before you can become a cop and usually you won't be able to do the last ½ right away, they'll only let you in once you're in your mid 20s so you're more mature and it forces you to acquire related experience to build a better resume for when you send your application.
  
  Yeah, I just googled “police brutality quebec” and it doesn’t sound like that’s really working out for you.
- At least this one deserves consequences.. unlike that unfortunate shooting in the states.
  
  Wow, you just cannot help yourself, can you. Did the boiling water lady break your brain or something?
  This is the third comment you've left under a story that has nothing to do with her.
As always, ACAB.
- The term originates from Britain after all.
  All Coppers Are Bastards.
- bro takes an array of arrays of floats, collapses the floats into booleans, the arrays of booleans into a single boolean each and then collapses the array of booleans into a single boolean
  the amount of data lost in your thought process is crazy, this kinda shit is the real brainrot
  also isn't "all [type of person] are x" what brought us racism lmao
  
  i know you tried to sound smart there but your first paragraph is nonsensical, jsyk
  "type of person" is too broad to make your question valid. depends on what "type" means.
  if by type you mean facial features and color of skin, eh sure, why not... even though it's less that and more about justifying oppression for power and resources.
  but you used it in the context of acab, in which case type means what you do for a living which is entirely different from skin color... so no. you can make such judgments, and it wouldn't be racism or even have remotely similar thought process (say, as you could point to sexism, homophobia, etc as at least having some parallels in the way of thinking).
  so yes, i can say all cops are bastards, all vulture capitalists are monsters, all landlords are leeches, all billionaires are immoral, all republican politicians are demons...
  
  Bootlick much?
  
  Is being a cop an unchanging characteristic that you’re born with?
  Can someone choose to just change their ethnicity on a whim?
  Well, I’d say holding a specific occupation that has harmful effects on the people around you and choosing to maintain it makes you a bastard, since you can just stop being a cop, and therefore stop being a problem. People aren’t born being a cop. They choose to become one. And that choice makes them a damn rotten bastard.
  I don’t think any data was lost in girlfreddy’s thought process, I think you disagreed and tried to form a logical line of thought to disprove theirs while sounding smart, and ended up making some false equivalences and oversimplifications in the process
  In short, acab
- Disgusting... I hope you get to live in a nation with no police some day.
  
  Look, if I need someone to show up to a crime scene the day after it happened and shoot my dog, I know who to call.
  
  Ok.
  
  I live in Russia, people here generally don't trust police.
  "Call us when they actually kill you", beating out confessions, cooperating with crooks, and, of course, possessing enormous persuasion skills when they need you to throw away your report of a crime which they don't want to deal with.
  There are people good and bad like everywhere else, but the atmosphere while talking to these people is very special.
In a tragic lack of manners
a person taped a cop to the chair, beat the hell out of them, shocked them with a tazer and repeatedly stomped on their head
and got called a psycho, and sentenced to death.
This cop on the other hand
got punished
for being recorded doing so.
I wonder if some people carrying guns see every confrontation as a matter of life and death since they are carrying a deadly weapon that could be used against them if they temporarily lose control in a struggle.
- When you have got a hammer everything looks like a nail.
- I could be wrong but i believe british police dont routinely carry guns
- No, but they don't see those unarmed (uniform counts as "arms" here too) as equal to them. It's human psychology. Also you may read up on psychology of war crimes and what makes a combatant shoot up a civilian car.
  If you've done fencing (be it with rapiers or with carolingian swords as LARPers do), you know the feeling, it's a very basic instinct.
  The hammer and nail saying also rings right, if you take a hammer and weigh it in your hand, you'll feel differently. Or an axe. Or a dog's lead with roulette, try to hold it half a meter from the roulette itself and weigh it, it too feels like a weapon.
  It's such a cool thought I've had this morning. Basic human instincts tell us that for a sane society all free people should bear arms. Not necessarily something fitting to shoot up a school. But means to fight for yourself and resist.
Let me make light of this horrible reason why I dislike travel. It's the fucking peanuts! Isn't it? We've been pushed from having a very small but still nice meal to 3 peanuts and you can't bring water. WTF! I rather watch 10 people puke than not have a choice of drinking something when I feel like it... not when they bring me a tiny cup of whatever. So my carry-on is always some water and lots of snacks.
I bet that's what started all this. I hate flying. I hate having to undress for the TSA to count my balls and to see if there's only one on each side. I don't do that for driving my car. And I drive my car around all sorts of places. Why do we care about flying safety so much? Specially safety with respect to other passengers vs safety with respect to emergency door rapid disassembly? I rather watch a cop beat the shit out of the CEO of Boeing when a screw is missing. That would make flying a whole lot safer.
- This isn't a copypasta, meaning it's an original one.
  
  Thanks! So, you in? LOL.
  
  Good lord this gave me a fucking stroke
- I thought this was a trump quote, but more coherent.
- Specially safety with respect to other passengers vs safety with respect to emergency door rapid disassembly?
  Law&order vs freedom&evolution compromise in a nutshell.
JFC that video looked brutal
Cops doing cops things.
Ah it's nice to see pushback, but bro went too far for the uk for sure
Mate in the back sat on the bench just chilling.
No doubt it's because he was presumably Muslim, or at least the cops would think he was being that the woman he was with is wearing a hijab.
I’d like to know more context about this whole situation, apparently there was a big kerfuffle and another police officer had to be treated for a broken nose.
This guy looks like some dumbass kid who got himself over-excited after being given a gun and a badge though. He’s probably set his career back by 10 years after this dumbass move.
- That shouldn't be a setback of ten years, it should be an automatic attempted manslaughter charge and exclusion from any job that gives immediate power over strangers.
  
  What is with internet comments being obsessed with attempted manslaughter?
  No this is ABH/GBH at best depending on injuries which should go with an immediate suspension. Attempted manslaughter is not possible to convict
- "Set his career back by 10 years"
  Nah. I'd rather he rots in jail 10 years. I don't want that guy walking freely around, let alone with a fucking gun and authority.
- What context could possibly make brutally kicking and stomping a man lying on the floor acceptable? It doesn't matter what happened before, this is supposedly a trained officer in an intervention, not a drunken street brawl.
  Cop should immediately get fired and charged for aggravated bodily assault if there was any justice.
  
  Context is everything. Police officers are police officers but they’re also humans and they get stressed and do things that they wouldn’t do if they were thinking clearly. For all we know this guy might otherwise be an upstanding officer who immediately regret what he did.
  It’s the UK, not the US. They don’t just let all the police walk around with guns. This guy’s a firearms officer and if they’re called to an incident at an airport then something pretty serious is kicking off.
  If you got really stressed at work and made a split second decision that you immediately knew was a bad idea you’d want people to know the context.
  I’m not defending kicking the guy in the head, I’m just wondering what it takes for someone to get to that point where they think that’s a good idea.
  
  According to an article in the Guardian, the guy and a couple of his friends were called by one of their moms who had an argument on a plane, so they went to the airport to beat up some people. Cops arrive to arrest them and they start fighting the cops.
  Sure he'll be fired and charged. But it's a bit of a stretch to expect someone who's just had to fight off a group of lunatics to just flip the adrenaline switch and turn into an office clerk in two seconds
- Setting his career back 10 years?! I’d expect him to be booted from the force at the very least.
Anybody who thinks this cop is behaving better than the one in the states that shot in self defense is an idiot imho.

142 comments