Source: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images / Getty
You don’t have to be smart, rational, or even remotely reasonable to be a police officer in this country and that’s a major problem.
According to an NBCNews report, a 27-year-old Black man named Silvester Hayes was attacked, beaten, tasered, and zip-tied by Dallas police officers back in 2001 over an egregious case of ”mistaken identity”. Hayes is a single father of four children and was going to get them food when he was pulled over for “failing to signal at a stop sign”. The lawsuit filed against officers Walter Paul Guab and Holly Harris calls that reasoning “suspicious” and “obviously manufactured”. Hayes says he gave Guab and Harris his license and was forthcoming in telling them that he was in possession of a legal firearm. Here’s where things went left…
Without even running his license through the computer system that provides officers information, Harris took one look at his name, assumed he was a man named “Sylvester” who had an open warrant for domestic violence, and immediately began yanking him out of his vehicle.
The lawsuit claims that officers “escalated their aggression” and “manhandled” Hayes to the point where they pulled his arm out of its socket. When more officers arrived on the scene, one them yelled “gun!” after seeing the firearm in Hayes car which served to further escalate the violence against him.
When all was said and done, Harris was reportedly heard saying “F**k, we got the wrong guy.” This were these good-for-nothing pigs added insult to injury. They STILL tried to find a way to lay charges on the man they had just wrongly accosted. Via NBCNews:
In one of the videos, three officers are heard discussing whether Hayes is a felon and what charges they can bring against him.
“Is he a felon?” an unidentified officer asks.
“He has not been convicted,” Guab responds. “Or, no felon?”
“No felon,” the unidentified officer says before asking Guab about a charge of resisting arrest.
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to put the resisting, because you can’t resist detention,” Guab says.
Hayes was subsequently arrested and charged with resisting arrest and possession of an unlawful weapon. According to the lawsuit, the charges were dropped a year later.
We hope all these bacon-scented “blue lives” are fired and charged with crimes on top of the lawsuits that they are facing.
