14 San Francisco Police Officers Harassed and Brutalized a One-Legged Homeless Black Man

In San Francisco, a city in which the chief of police Greg Suhr earns more than any other police chief in the United States, it's apparently common practice for local police officers to publicly humiliate homeless citizens for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The video above depicts the violent and wholly unsettling harassment of an unidentified one-legged homeless black man by local police following an anonymous call that the man was "waving sticks around." These "sticks" turned out to simply be crutches, though such a revelation didn't deter officers in the slightest from committing predictably sickening brutality.

The incident began with an exponentially increasing police force near Twitter headquarters, according to writer Chaédria LaBouvier. The swift and unsettling takedown of the obviously unarmed citizen reportedly occurred in the mid-market region of San Francisco, a quickly escalating incident of police brutality that sadly joins the long list of such incidents not only in San Francisco, but the entire country.

According to LaBouvier's detailed account of the incident, the number of officers at the scene of the man's institutionalized humiliation eventually totaled (at least) 14. Despite the man repeatedly telling officers he was currently suffering an infection, the officers stepped on his prosthetic leg, often twisting it and leaving it out of place. As noted time and time again, incidents like this are sadly not isolated. If anything, they have now become so prevalent that many simply treat such brutality as an unfortunate byproduct of this country's police infrastructure.

Police reform on a national level is needed now, perhaps more than ever.