Police Brutality is 1 Clear Worthwhile Story

Tenth in an occasional series about about compelling stories and ideas worth telling.

I recently received an email from a New Jersey woman. It said, “Hello. I was wondering if this story could become a book. Below are 2 articles, but there are many, many more articles out like this.”

So far, so normal. I often get email queries like this.

Then I clicked on the links. One story was about police brutality and how one cop was known for using extreme force. The other story announced the settlement six years later the woman secured from the city and that the cop in question had resigned from the department and was permanently banned from any law enforcement job.

Police brutality is a problem in this country. According to the University of Chicago’s Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project, 250,000 civilians are hurt by police, and more than 600 are killed each year. Anytime a ghostwriter can bring such problems to light, he or she should. This is definitely a story worthy of attention.

Rodney King in 1991. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Philando Castille in 2016, Michael Brown and Eric Garner two years before that, and Walter Scott in 2015. These are famous cases of police brutality.

But there are plenty of not-famous cases, including this woman. There is a video of her being manhandled by the officer.

She had been stopped in 2018 for a possible DUI and failed the sobriety test, which is not seen on the 105-second video. It started with the officer telling her she was under arrest and trying to handcuff her. She stepped back, not wanting to be cuffed, and saying she needed her phone to call her husband and that the police had her phone. The officer’s response was to pick her up by the neck with his left hand and swing her over his hip to the ground. Then the officer and his partner pinned her arms back, cuffed her, pulled her upright, and walked her to the patrol car.

She was 50 years old, 5-feet-4 and 90 pounds. He was 28, 6-1, 230 pounds.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Walk to the car with me,” the officer who threw her down said.

“You have to call my husband,” she said as she walked. “I can’t breathe.”

She was put into the patrol car, where she asked to call her husband and go to the hospital. She was told they would call him when they got to the station.

“No! Right now! You have to call my husband. I can’t breathe,” she repeated.

“How well can you breathe?” an officer asked.

She didn’t immediately answer, but she could be heard breathing heavily and laboriously.

“Um, yo, I need to go to the hospital,” she said. “I need to go to the hospital.”

“For what?” an officer said.

“You just broke my rib,” she replied, “and I can’t breathe and you smashed my face.”

She let out a sigh as the video ended.

She later sued the officers, the police chief and the city, receiving a settlement five years later for $1.25 million. She told me in a separate email she was seeking $6 million “but I had been going through this nightmare for 6 years and a trial would of (sic) lasted years more.”

What makes this compelling is many others have suffered police brutality, so there’s a relatability factor. Also, there are numerous books about police brutality, its victims and perpetrators, so there’s a market for it.

Finally, there’s video, which would make it easy for a ghostwriter to describe it and put the reader right there.

I have a personal reason for wanting to do this project. In college, I served on a jury in which a family of three Black men sued the Los Angeles Police Department for police brutality. As this was s civil case, the jury needed only eight votes to reach a verdict. There were several white people who always believed the police and a couple of Black people who never believed the police, leaving about six of us to try and figure things out. By the time we were done, we had reached two verdicts and were hung on a third, and I was disillusioned and saddened.

But even without my individual concern, this is still a story worth telling for a ghostwriter in Austin or anywhere. We even provide a ghostwriter in Dallas.

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