A writer for “Family Guy” has garnered attention from a blog he wrote detailing, what he described as the forceful actions of police on demonstrators during LAPD’s raid on the Occupy Los Angeles encampment.
In contrast to the officers he said entered the scene with weapons, Patrick Meighan claims he was among a group of protestors during the early morning raid sitting Indian-style with their hands interlocked chanting words of peace.
“The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted ‘We Are Peaceful’ and ‘We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us,” he wrote. Meighan described officers ransacking the encampment one tent at a time.
“As we sat there encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park,” he blogged. “They forcibilby removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park.”
Meighan described in detail the physical tactics he said were used by police to get those who were peacefully resisting arrest to unlink from one another.
“It was horrible to watch,” he wrote, “and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us.”
He said he ultimately decided to voluntarily unlink his arms, yet was not spared an arrest that would later produce bruising, and nerve damage in his thumb and palm.
Still, Meighan does not believe the arrests made that morning were, as he wrote it, “uniquely-brutal.”
“The LAPD officers were just doing their jobs, as they understood them,” he blogged.
Meighan says he wrote the blog to call attention to a differently injustice.
"We as a society, including the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD treat peaceful non-violent protesters one particular way, sort of give them the full force of the law. Whereas at the same time, there are folks who have defrauded our nation out of hundreds of billions of dollars, and those folks walk free."
NBC4 forwarded the blog to the LAPD. A spokesperson declined to make a public response, saying then they'd have to respond to every arrest.
But they say, all complaints can be made formally to the department and internal affairs will look into it.
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