Today was one of those days when I got to witness police brutality, but luckily for me, I wasn't the person at the end of their wrath but just another witness who watched and did nothing as these guys in uniform continued to remind us how much of a bad place this country is.
Sometime around noon today, I was on my way back home when I noticed that a vehicle had got surrounded by some officers of the law. Our bus had stopped at the traffic light and was waiting for it to turn green, so we had a couple of seconds to sit and watch as this officer took his rifle and punctured the tires of this vehicle.
For some reason the driver had refused to wind down his window or even get out of the car. He just sat there as he watched everything happen. At first, he couldn't drive off, as some officers were standing right in front of his vehicle, and any attempt to flee could easily injure them, which would then give them the right to open fire at him.
So he stayed calm, but the moment he saw an opening, he immediately drove away, and at first we all thought he had escaped. But when the lights turned green, and we eventually continued the journey, we noticed not too far away that he had been cornered by the same officers again, but this time, they had been able to forcefully drag him out of his vehicle into theirs.
But that wasn't even the crazy part, because not too long after, we saw these officers hitting this guy. One was holding him so that he wouldn't be able to move or fight back, while another had this whip, something called a koboko (which basically is a short whip with more than just one rope attached to it), and he was aggressively flogging this guy with it.
It was a crazy thing to witness, and yet no one said or did anything. Everybody just watched as these men and women in uniform did all they did to that guy before eventually taking him away in their vehicle. It was a very scary thing to watch and goes to show how much the law is being ignored in this country.
