There is currently a tempest in a teapot over a couple of young punks brawling in a mall in Bridgewater, New Jersey. A couple of cops arrive, pull one punk off the other, thrust the one punk onto a lounge couch, and handcuff the other punk who is still down on the floor. Because the cuffed punk on the floor is black and the other punk isn’t, this just has to be an instance of the black punk being treated differently simply because he’s black, right?
Not necessarily. We have to ask whether there was a difference in the behavior of the two combatants that might explain the difference in the way they were treated. Cell phone video was taken of the incident, and that footage shows—albeit fleetingly—the reason the black kid was cuffed. Between 0:02 and 0:04, as the officers lay hands on the one kid crouched over the other and are moving him away, the black kid throws a punch at the kid the officers already have under control. The move is partially obscured by a youth in the foreground who gets up off one of the lounge couches and moves out of the frame. It was immediately after the black kid threw that punch that one of the officers was on top of him; it appeared that the cop’s move was a reaction to the black kid’s throwing of the punch. Clicking on the gear-shaped icon in the lower right of the screen allows the viewer to slow the playback speed to 0.25 to get a better look at the action.
Slowing the playback speed does absolutely no good, however, if the part where the black kid throws the punch has been edited out. This is the case with this video produced by the crack CBS New York office, the edit taking place in the footage between 0:18 and 0:29. Some viewers apparently didn’t even catch the edit, one commenter stating, “You have the video that clearly shows what happened.” No you don’t.
