Video of law enforcement officers beating a Ducks game attendee with police batons was posted on Facebook by Kim Bliss and is swiftly making the social media rounds. The footage from the game in Santa Clara, California is disturbing particularly in view of the recent attention to police brutality and overzealous use of force the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases have wrought.
Those cases of course involve white officers shooting and killing unarmed black men, and minorities are disproportionately affected by police brutality — despite what Bill O’Reilly might think — and that’s quite different from beating a fan at a Ducks game, but perhaps an incident like this helps bring the discussion of excessive use of force to a larger white population who think “that wouldn’t happen to me.”
Bliss writes in her post, which you can see below with the video, that the man getting hit with the batons “was there with his son and tried to go down the wrong pathway” and says the police had a Taser out right before she began to record.
Update: The Facebook post has been taken down, but Deadspin has the video here. The sports news site says it has confirmed with the Santa Clara Police Department that its officers were involved.
Still image from the video.