White on white police brutality?

If there's an upside to the increase in use of the taser as a tool of law enforcement, it's that it's made it so that police brutality is no longer primarily the domain of black kids in the ghetto. Or at least that's how it seems. These days, half the time you hear about someone getting fucked the fuck up by the police, it's some crazed cracka-ass cracka throwing a bitchfit in public.

Take for example this kid who got tased down in Florida, probably the most famous tasing incident in this country to date. He had the sheer balls to ask John Kerry whether or not he belongs to a secret society with President Sieg Howdy and whether or not that may have had something to do him being so quick to concede the election to Bush, despite there being so much evidence of shenanigans with regard to the voting process, especially in the black community. Which is a completely valid question, by the way; it's something I've often wondered myself. In fact, when he was tased, he was clutching a copy of Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse, which deals with a lot of these issues, and which I reviewed on my own site back in '06.

You get the idea that, had this been in the days before 5-0 could just bust out the Star Trek phasers on a mofo as if they were playing the Nintendo Wii (nullus?), the cops would've just grabbed him and shoved his ass out of the door of auditorium - rather than, say, throwing him in a choke hold, or beating the living shit out of him the way they would if he was black. So if you're black, there is a sort of KRS-One on 9/11-style justice to this issue. I mean, it's still the rare occasion you hear about a white person getting filled with bullet holes as if they were swiss cheese, or getting beaten to a bloody pulp with a nightstick. But damnit if cracka-ass crackas aren't electrocuting their own as if it was going out of style.

Which is not to say that black folks haven't been hit with the juice at all. Probably the most famous example of a rapper getting zapped is Nelly's weed carrier Ali, who got fucked the fuck up by a cop during a traffic stop here in St. Louis a year or so go. Granted he didn't actually die, like the crazed Polack who thought it would be a good idea to start throwing computer screens in an airport in Canada, but that guy was old, and probably on drugs or something. Of all of the tasering incidents I've ever heard of (and trust me, I seek these things out), Ali's struck me as the most brutal of them all. You'll recall that he made it a point to note (perhaps for the sake of an eventual lawsuit) that he got zapped so many times (something like 50 times in all) he ended up shitting his pants.

Which brings me to my point. If these cracka-ass crackas are zapping themselves with tasers as if they were on an episode of MTV's Jackass, imagine what they might do to you. So far, there aren't as many prominent incidents of black kids getting, but that's probably because 5-0 still won't think twice about unloading on us if they think we've got something shiny in our pockets. In that sense, I suppose it could be viewed as a sign of progress if cops started zapping black kids rather than shooting them, but I don't know. I definitely don't want to get shot, but I don't want to get tased either. And I wouldn't be surprised if cops start busting out their tasers more and more often, especially since there apparently isn't nearly as much legal risk as choking someone out or beating the shit out of them.

But maybe there should be.