Gilberto Powell says the police were following him in their cruiser as he was walking home. The police report says the officers decided to stop Gilberto after they noticed a "bulge" in Gilberto's pants. After an officer tried to conduct a patdown, the report claims Gilberto attempted to flee.
Gilberto denies trying to run away and says he did everything the officer asked him to do. What happened next resulted in the photograph above.
After Powell was finally handcuffed and questioned, the officers realized he was "mentally challenged, was not capable of understanding our commands, and that the bulge in his waistband was a colostomy bag," the report said. (source)By that time, Gilberto had been hit, knocked to the ground and the bag had reportedly been ripped from his body. The father says by the time he and Gilberto's mother ran outside to their son, the cops had removed Gilberto's pants and had him out there by his boxer shorts.
The mother asked the officer, "Didn't you know he was a Down Syndrome kid?" to which the cop responded, "I'm not a doctor, I didn't know."
The family's attorney Philip Gold said that it should've been immediately obvious that Gilberto has special needs:
If you just look at Gilberto, he 5-foot-3, 130 pounds with Down Syndrome, it's 100 percent obvious he has Down Syndrome," he said. It's impossible to believe [the police's story] if you hear one word out of Gilberto's mouth." (source)
Reader Comments
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As I was composing my comment on this story my computer froze and then shut-down on its own and what-do-you-know, my comment was deleted. I think it would be best for myself to just stay away from the news all together because when I see and read stories like this I CAN'T KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT OR KEEP MY COMMENTS TO MYSELF.
Where are all the tough-guy comments about "retards" now? And how could SOTT pass up another opportunity to call someone a "retard"?
SOTT has had a real problem dropping the R bomb lately, and it seems like each time I speak up about it, some macho dick actually tries to justify it.
Folks, this is what I'm talking about - this is why calling stupid people "retards" isn't funny. This poor kid was beat up by a bunch of human-hating asshole cops. This is the kind of kid who's made fun of and called "retard" by those same people. Calling people "retards" is a slap in the face to this kid and his parents. Just think about that when you're slinging around hateful words.
Please, enough with the PC stuff already! The SOTT article that upset you was clearly using the perjorative term 'retarded' for Barack Obama's comments about 'freedom not being free'. Certainly we could have done deeper, 'more scholarly' analysis of the text his speechwriters gave him to read out to other NATO members, but thankfully we can rely on the assumption that common sense is not yet completely lost. Most recognised that when we called his comments 'retarded', we were speaking in that same everyday common language they themselves use to convey their disgust/disbelief/disdain for their authority figures' backwards and destructive worldview, one that IS, at root, spiritually retarded. Psychological literature today relies on the term psychopathy to describe the actions of Obama and his ilk, but there was a time when the clinical term was 'moral imbecile'. This in no way sought to equivocate ordinary people with developmental handicaps to the subjects in question: they were simply exploring the most appropriate terminology to describe the utterly different internal landscape of psychopaths.
To link the term's use in that context with the above, a clear case of inhuman abuse of another and a symptom of what is wrong with U.S. and Western civilization in general, is to completely miss the crux of the matter. Sadly, many in the West are so hystericized at this point that they will blithely pass over extraordinarily evil crimes against humanity done in their name, while taking offence at the drop of a hat merely because a particular word fires an association in their mind that provokes indignation and lashing out in a way that is detrimental to themselves and others.
I hate to do the old 'some of my best friends are Jews' routine, but I have a very mentally-handicapped relative, and another who is handicapped to a lesser degree, so your idea that, somehow, merely using the term 'retarded' - in whatever context - directly or indirectly leads to horrific situations like the above simply doesn't fly with my experience about what makes people treat handicapped people as less than human. Cops don't beat the crap out of people with Down's Syndrome because they have become specifically desensitized to Down's Syndrome due to colloquial use of the term 'retarded'. Cops beat the crap out of people with Down's Syndrome because they have become desensitized to seeing EVERYONE as 'untermenschen'.
When you intercede on behalf of developmentally-challenged people with this special appeal, you only reinforce the racial programming that would set developmentally-challenged people apart from the human race, the opposite of your benevolent intentions. NO ONE deserves such treatment, from cops or anyone else.