Last week in Santa Clara County, two Asian cops were charged by the County DA with felony assault and battery for beating Albert Hopkins, a retired community college counselor who was merely sitting in his car after work.

After getting off work, a part-time job he has after retirement, he was sitting in his car resting, and the two Palo Alto policemen decided to arrest him and beat him for no reason, the DA said. Hopkins is Black, which could be a reason unto itself for many police officers.

After they failed to subdue Hopkins, they doused him extensively with pepper spray. According to the Santa Clara County District Attorney, Hopkins was doing nothing more than resting and the two officers for no legitimate reason decided to harrass him and harm his person.

This incident got much coverage in the local paper because the two officers were Asian and both were rookies. This may well demonstrate that instead of the new people with new cultural sensitivity bringing greater awareness of respect for all people into the police departments, these two Asian cops have merely been consumed by the historical white cop culture.

Blacks pushed to open up the police departments and bring nonwhites into policing the community. But it seems to have not made too much of a difference to these two officers. That push for more nonwhites was to tame the wild and harmful culture of police departments as they related to ethnic numerally-minority citizens. Police departments have been inordinately white populated historically.

The action of these two rookie officers demonstrates a problem that needs highlighting, namely this: a number of Black, Brown, and Asian officers brought into the police forces to bring greater sensitivity and compassion to policing have been co-opted by the ruthless and Black-hating culture of many police departments across this nation.

It is odd that with all the Ph.D., students doing research on all things, the clearly pathological behavior of police toward Black citizens has not been dissected as it should be; for it is an abnormality that has existed in our community too long. Were it a Black behavior, it would have been labeled for what it is, an abnormality in human behavior.

In Santa Clara County, these two officers will have to defend their actions in a court of law. And the outcome of their behavior may mean they serve 3-10 years in prison. But aside from this criminal behavior, this behavior is also pathological, and that pathology is not confined to these two Asian officers but for the many historically who have been white perperaters of violence on Black citizens under the color of law. []

Gibbs