Protesting police brutality Monday in McKinney

The headline pretty much sums it up:

“Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party”

Then the piece rolls out as many of the facts as we now know — who the organizer was, a 20 year old young woman, that she lives in Craig Ranch, that the party got out of control, and that the officer who held a 14 year old girl on the ground was out of control. What will be interesting to know is how this all started, which now appears to have been a confrontation of sorts between the party organizer, Tatiana, and a white woman who Tatiana claims got physical and started the fight:  

In a video posted to YouTube on Sunday, a black teenager named Tatiana said her family was hosting a cookout for friends when a woman insulted them, prompting a 14-year-old family friend to respond. Tatiana said a white woman had then told her: “You need to go back to where you’re from” and to “go back to your Section 8 home. Tatiana said that she had replied, “Excuse me,” and that then another white woman hit her in the face and “both women attacked” her.”

But residents say that cook-out for friends turned out to be a pretty big party, with 130 kids climbing over the fence to get in to a private community pool.

Benét Embry, the host of an Internet-radio talk show, lives in the neighborhood and said he had seen the party grow out of control. Mr. Embry said as many as 130 young people had attended the party.

He said some of them scaled the pool’s fence after being turned away from the entrance by a security guard, who eventually called the police.

“As an African-American male, of course I had a concern seeing a 14-year-old African-American female in a swimsuit on the ground,” Mr. Embry said in a phone interview on Monday. “Of course I had concerns when I saw the officer pulling a gun. That’s when I started thanking God that nobody got hurt. But I don’t believe that the officer was coming out to pick on black kids.”

Now the sleepy town of McKinney has become the national poster child for police brutality — not a crime-ridden urban ghetto, not a blue-collar neighborhood suffering from unemployment, but a leafy suburban paradise in one of the highest employment corridors in the nation. It’s a place where many believe they are escaping episodes like this for the peace and safety of their families.

But perhaps it was that suburban setting that helped make the images so powerful and disturbing. Now a video of a police officer pointing a gun at teenagers in bathing suits and shoving a young black girl’s face into the ground has become the latest flash point in relations between the police and minorities.

Whether the officer, David Eric Casebolt, was appropriate or not, his actions are yet another nail in the coffin of the image the world now has of American police even.  I spoke to a young woman from Bogota, Columbia last night who had seen the video broadcast on TV.

“American police terrify me,” she said. “I am so afraid of them.”