Laughing Bystanders Egg on Punk Allegedly Beating Cop's Face Bloody in Brutal Attack
Anti-police sentiment fueled by movements like Black Lives Matter and codified by sympathetic politicians has real-world consequences.
Michael Sale, an officer with the Rowland Police Department in North Carolina, may have learned that firsthand when he was allegedly assaulted this past weekend while attempting to arrest a suspect identified as Jamel Alphonso Rogers.
Shockingly, rather than come to his aid, bystanders laughed and taunted the officer, including one man who livestreamed the incident while Sale was being pummeled, WPDE-TV reported.
Sale, 27, was alone on duty and responding to a call about a disturbance in the area when he got locked into a scuffle with the suspect.
During the nearly 11-minute ordeal, only one man briefly pulled the suspect off of the officer before releasing him to get right back to it.
Others urged one another to help, but none did.
“You the police, why am I [going to] help you folk?” one man, who seemed to be the one filming, scoffed in reply when the officer asked for assistance.
He simply continued to record while the lone officer was thrown to to ground, hit in the face and pinned down as he tried unsuccessfully to take the suspect into custody.
The officer was without a gun for at least part of the incident, as apparently, the weapon and other equipment were temporarily lost during the altercation but later recovered.
“You can’t do nothing without your gun,” the man livestreaming taunted Sale.
He could be heard continually egging the suspect on to fight the officer, and he broke out into laughter several times.
At the end of the confrontation, both Rogers and the suspect eventually sat exhausted on the ground, with the officer shown bleeding from the eye and nose as he waited for backup.
WARNING: The imagesbelow contain graphic language and graphic violence that some viewers may find disturbing:
Rogers was charged with two counts of resisting a public officer, as well as additional charges of kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon with intentions to kill while inflicting serious injuries. He was being held on $500,000 bond.
Sale, meanwhile, had to be airlifted to the hospital early Saturday morning.
“Today’s society, that’s just how they think and operate,” Rowland Police Chief Hubert B. Graham told WPDE regarding the incident. “This is something that we, as law enforcement, been telling the public for years. It’s not shocking to us because we been doing this for years.”
“I wish I had more assistance from the community because they knew the situation the officer was in,” Graham also said.
An update to the story said Sale was at home recovering, but did not specify the scope of his injuries.
Robeson County Sheriff Burnis Wilkins weighed in on social media, decrying the “total disregard for authority.”
“This is the harsh reality that law enforcement in America is facing right now where some think it’s okay to Defund the Police, Assault the Police and actually laugh and video the event while it’s occurring while at the same time encouraging the suspect to continue to fight the officer even after the officer has lost his weapon and is obviously disabled,” the North Carolina sheriff wrote on Facebook.
“Law Enforcement is here to protect and serve. We aren’t the enemy,” he continued.
Officer Sale was in an impossible position, considering anything he did to subdue the suspect could have cost him his job or worse, sparked riots.
Police officers are literally and figuratively being cornered by criminals who can attack them with reckless abandon while bystanders mostly cheer on the suspect.
The country was united after video emerged of the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, but the aftermath of the incident has become a seminal moment of the radical anti-police movement.
The rhetoric of Black Lives Matter and politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggest that police are murdering innocent black people, which is not only untrue, but also partly responsible for fueling public hatred and distrust for police.
It’s only a matter of time before officers like Sale simply walk off the job, too afraid of the high stakes catch-22 dilemma of either using their weapon and being smeared as a racist murderer, or not using enough force and ending up injured or dead themselves.
Our police officers deserve better than this if they’re going to put themselves in harm’s way every day for their community.
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