Seeking Accountability for Cops in Brownback v. King
Cato Podcast
Cato Institute
4.5 • 979 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 24th, 2020. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Caleb Brown, when members of a state and federal police task force cornered and severely beat 21-year-old James King in 2014, it's clear |
| 0:16.3 | that his constitutional rights were violated, but who did the violating? The |
| 0:20.4 | state, the feds, or both. It matters for the purposes of enforcing those rights against the government. |
| 0:26.0 | Patrick Jockema at the Institute for Justice is representing James King in a lawsuit where police hope to protect those officers from any |
| 0:33.5 | accountability for their actions. We spoke last week. James King was a 21-year-old |
| 0:38.8 | college student at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan in |
| 0:42.3 | 2014. |
| 0:44.0 | He was walking between two summer jobs when he came upon two men dressed in street clothes leaning |
| 0:49.3 | against a black SUV. |
| 0:51.6 | James didn't know it, but these two men were a Grand Rapids Police |
| 0:55.0 | Detective and an FBI agent who were both members of a joint state federal |
| 1:00.1 | fugitive task force and they were looking for a fugitive who was wanted for |
| 1:04.9 | breaking into his boss's apartment and stealing empty pop cans and liquor bottles |
| 1:09.4 | because Michigan has a bottle deposit and they had a very broad description and some old |
| 1:14.8 | photograph of this guy who looked nothing like James other than the two are both |
| 1:19.0 | white men. So the these two guys started talking to James, they asked him his name, he answered. |
| 1:25.0 | In quick succession, they put him up against a car and one of them tried to take his wallet out of his pocket, |
| 1:30.0 | at which point he believed he was being mugged. |
| 1:32.0 | So he screamed out, am I being mugged and tried to run away at which point one of the officers tackled James to the ground and choked him unconscious. Then when James came to, he bit the guy on the arm to try to save his own life and the guy later testified at James's criminal trial that he beat James in the face and head as hard as I could, as fast as I I could and as many times as I could. So once onlookers |
| 1:57.1 | called the police because they didn't think these guys were cops either the police |
| 2:00.0 | showed up and everyone was still confused but eventually they determined that |
... |
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