Baited and Switched
Just when I thought things couldn’t get anymore bizarre in this town I get proven incorrect. I thought after Brandon Johnson, Al Sharpton and Shamus Patton, we’d be done with silliness for a while. No such luck.
My colleagues at RTV 6 are reporting that an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Officer was injured after being baited into an altercation. The details are pretty simple. Sgt. Matt Grimes was giving a presentation to a church audience at Municipal Gardens when a fight broke out.
According to 6 News, Grimes intervened and was thrown to the ground. he pulled out his taser and was prepared to use it when someone stepped in and said it was just a test to see how the office would react.
The idiot responsible for this “test” was Pastor James Harrington of the Mt. Vernon Missionary Baptist Church. Vernon says he set up the scenario to test a white officer’s reaction to a fight between two black men.
Both city and police union officials were livid, saying not only was an officer injured, but one of the young men involved in the “demonstration” could have also been hurt or worse. And to add insult to injury Harrington is denying the officer was hurt.
A park manager, who had previous knowledge of the plan, was suspended.
This is not the first time an officer has been the victim of a “bait and switch”. I’ve reported on some people instigating altercations with police in hopes that force will be used against them and they can later sue IMPD.
Harrington says he was trying to engage in a “teachable moment” and that they have to do what they can to “save the lives of their children”. No offense padre, but there were a million other ways that this could have been done to teach the kids about interacting with police, and IMPD would have been happy to cooperate. All you would have had to do was ask.
Instead an officer has been injured, possible felony battery charges could be filed, and this whole experiment has done nothing to improve police-community relations. In fact, as this story continues to get out, it will only make matters worse and make you and certain segments of the clergy population in this city even more irrelevant to the constructive dialogue that actually is taking place.
