Behind The Unfortunate Event That Has Been In Your Face for the Last Week

So I”m sure if you live in the US, you have heard about or seen the video about the cop and the teen girl in McKinney, Texas. It is even likely  that if you live outside the US you may have heard about it through social media. I’m curious how much you know about what happened leading up to the events that were captured in the video. I’m going to describe what lead up to those events on both sides, in chronological order and then we can talk about it. I hope that if my views on this differ from yours, we can still be friends or at least frenemies.

THE PARTY AND THE PARTY PLANER

Meet Tatiana a party planner and promoter. According to Breitbart and The Conservative Tree House she had been promoting the Pool party for about a month on Twitter. The party was going to be in the common area next to the private pool in the planned neighbourhood of Craig Ranch. The neighbourhood has an HOA (Home Owners Association) that governs the community in order to keep up property values and appearances and to increase the safety of the residents. This HOA has rules about  pool parties, pictured to the right. Though I didn’t see anything about cookouts in the area outside the gated pool area. Now Tatiana promoted it as a pool party, but she or her mother never okayed it with the HOA. She hired a DJ and got a bounce house and other stuff for a party. When it came time for the party she sent out more invites on Twitter as did the DJ. Because of the social media coverage of the event within her circle the number of kids at the party grew to anywhere from 70 to 130 depending on which eyewitness account you’re looking at. Now that is a very large group of teens to have anywhere without a large number of adults to keep things under control, and this I speak about from my own experiences with a large youth group at our church. So according to residents a large majority of the kids were actually acting quite well but, unfortunately, a small number of them were not. One of the residents that witnessed the whole thing, Benet Embry, stated ” 7 knuckleheads ruined the whole thing.” Other residents claim that some of the teens were drinking and/or taking drugs. However, these claims are not proven. Embry and other residents have stated that things started to get out of hand when many kids that didn’t live in the neighbourhood, and didn’t have pool privileges showed up and forced their way into the pool area. The teens pushed or assaulted, depending on the witness, the security guards that tried to turn them away. Some of the kids jumped the fence to get into the pool area. Now this is when the first calls to the police were made do to “Criminal Trespass” since these kids were not authorized to be in the pool area.  Some of the residents that were at the pool with their children went home, others stayed. Of those that stayed, one was a woman that ended up in a fight with Tatiana. How that fight was started isn’t caught on video, but how it ended is here. Tatiana claims that the woman was making racial comments and then slapped her. Other witnesses deny, or claim ignorance of Tatiana’s account of what caused that fight. I personally don’t care who started that fight. Tatiana is a twenty-year-old woman and this other lady is older and they both should have known better, and they both should be charged for that fight. Now back to the story. After that fight, more calls to the police were made about the physical assault. That is the party and the party planner summed up as best as I could.

 

The Officer

This is former Officer Eric Casebolt. I want to start with the beginning of his shift at 6 p.m. about 1 hour before the events at the pool party. This is as reported by his attorney in a press conference you can find here. His first call of the evening was to an apartment complex where an African-American man had committed suicide poolside in front of his wife and kids. Casebolt helped take photos of the scene, take statements from witnesses, and helped to comfort the deceased grieving widow. When he left that call he was dispatched to another home somewhere in McKinney where a teenage girl was on the roof of her parents house threatening to commit suicide. Here Casebolt was able to calm the girl, and managed to get her to come down from the roof safely. Immediately after that call he was asked to respond to calls at the pool party for criminal trespass. He expressed that he was reluctant to do so, due to the “emotional toll” of the previous calls. However when a new call came in shortly after, that there was now a physical assault he felt that it was his duty to go and help his fellow officers.

 

Now to talk about the video itself

Here is a link to the original video if you haven’t seen it. But I will warn you it’s not pretty and there is some cursing. Now I’m gonna say what I think about the events in the video then I would like to hear what you have to say, but I’m only gonna leave the comment section open till Thursday June 18 so that we can all move on. It’s obvious that Casebolt is acting frantic by the time the video starts rolling. I can’t speak for him or read his mind, but it looks like some of the kids are having a hard time doing what he tells them to. As the boys are sitting there and he is starting to catch his breath, he tells the girls to leave the area several times. as they start to leave one girl seems to stop and turn around and talk back to him. Then some things happen out of view and we can’t hear what is said. When they do come back, he is trying to get her hand behind her back to cuff her and she is resisting. Did he handle the girl roughly? Yes, but I agree with the mother in this video.

And before you get too worked up at that, let me explain something. I have a 9-year-old daughter. She is the youngest of my kids. The oldest is 20. Out of all my children, the 9-year-old is the one that fights almost every time she gets into trouble. She is getting better, but she still fights. The way the girls in the video is acting reminds me of some of the things my daughter does when I’m getting on to her. When I take her by the arm to put her in the corner or onto the couch so we can talk, she will fight and squirm. When she does this she sometimes flies around me. As she does this, and she is not paying attention to her surroundings, it can cause her to hit or run into the wall or the table. Just so you know, she has never truly hurt herself when she has done this. And I can see how it would easily appear to someone else that I caused it because I had ahold of her arm. The problem with that is that SHE’s still in control of her feet. If she tries to pull away or get away that is her, not me. And though I do think the officer could have dealt with it better, I don’t think he was trying to hurt the girl. I just don’t see true malice in him. What I see is a frustrated cop doing what he thinks he needs to. If that had been my daughter in the video, I would have been very upset that she didn’t listen to the officer.

It doesn’t matter if the cop is cursing at you or talking politely. I have had a cop laugh in my face when I incorrectly stated how fast I was driving. It made me mad, not the ticket, the attitude. But I still gave him my license and insurance card. I have also been pulled over for no reason then given a bogus ticket for no insurance, that I got dropped later with the same insurance card I showed the cop. I still did what he said, even though he was wrong. THE OFFICERS HAVE THE AUTHORITY. They are the ones that we expect to keep us safe, even from ourselves sometimes. We must always treat them with respect. Some of them are @$$ holes. I’ve met a few on the side of the road in my time. I’ve even been thrown around by a couple in my life. Once over some stupid stuff my classmates and I were doing in high school. And once a few years ago over some tickets I had forgotten about. It can happen to anyone. Now I’m no criminal and I have nothing on my record, but some traffic tickets. I didn’t need to be treated like that, but I wasn’t truly hurt and I did make the mistake of forgetting about the tickets.

Moving on to the last 2 parts that have so many people upset. There is the part where he pulls his gun on the 2 boys. I don’t know what the boys were thinking, but why would anyone in their right mind run up on an officer who is in the process of forcibly detaining someone. I can understand that Casebolt probably felt threatened, I would too. He never actually aimed his gun at anyone, and as soon as the other officers went to get the boys, he holstered it. After that, there is the issue of him putting his knee in the girls back. Could he have held here there, while waiting on handcuffs, in a more comfortable way, yes. However, I doubt that cops are trained to be OVERLY concerned with the comfort of their suspects. They are taught to be concerned with the safety of everyone, but not their comfort.

 

That’s my 2 cents worth, now I’m interested in yours. If you disagree that’s great, we can hear each other out over the next few days. If you agree, then that’s great too. We all like to have our beliefs affirmed by others.

Thank you for reading this emotionally taxing article.

 

P.S. I had my 16-year-old daughter proofread this. And I just wanted to let y’all know, she agrees that the kids and their parents are the ones truly at fault.