QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AlterNet:

Memphis Cops Caught on Tape Beating Transsexual Prisoner

The video, recorded February 12th, shows Duanna Johnson in the booking area at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center after an arrest for prostitution. The tape clearly shows a Memphis police officer walk over to Johnson - a transsexual - and hit her in the face several times.

"Actually he was trying to get me to come over to where he was, and I responded by telling him that wasn't my name - that my mother didn't name me a 'faggot' or a 'he-she,' so he got upset and approached me. And that's when it started," Johnson said.

Johnson said the officer was attempting to call her over to be fingerprinted. She said she chose not respond to the derogatory name the officer called her.

"He said, 'I'm telling you, I'm giving you one more chance to get up.' So I'm looking at him, and he started putting his gloves on, and seen him take out a pair of handcuffs," Johnson said.

Click here to read more and to see the video.

Okay, I must admit that transsexuals weird me out a bit, and I'm not one hundred percent sure why. My speculation is that it has something to do with Freudian castration anxiety; that is, I see a transsexual person and I subconsciously imagine losing my family jewels--at least, that's what I think is happening. Damn the Butthole Surfers and the sex reassignment surgery film they projected at that concert I attended back in 1990.

At any rate, this is my problem to work out. It's caused by me. It's not caused by transsexuals, who have a perfect right to be whatever they want to be.

That's why this cop beating is so extraordinarily egregious. She was beaten for who she is. Not that it would have been okay if these cops were just being your typical violent asshole cops. But this is so hardcore because you have armed security agents of the government acting out their Freudian neuroses on a citizen who only resisted after what was going on became clear. This is no different from Rodney King. Cops taking out their weird psychological issues on relatively peaceful victims.

And it's no surprise, either. Police culture, nationwide, makes such incidents inevitable. Prevailing cop attitudes are hypermasculine, authoritarian, violent, and paranoid: put all that together with irrational fear of transsexuals and you get beatings. Or worse. The really sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Change cop culture and you change cop behavior.

Unfortunately, that just doesn't seem to be on anybody's political agenda at the moment.

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