Ah, A Wrinkle In Our Racist Cop Discourse

Let's talk about Michael Kenyon out of Phoenix, Arizona and $15,000,000.

July 6, 2024 was a 114-degree afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona. At some point, seemingly off downtown, there was a robbery in progress. A man named Michael Kenyon was cutting across a parking lot, and police — who apparently believed he had something to do with the robbery, although this was later claimed to be inaccurate — detained him. He sat on the back bumper of a Jeep/truck and was talking to cops for a while. There is no official body cam of this whole deal released at this time, but there is video from nearby people. It looks like the cops go to detain him or cuff him, and he struggles, and eventually the initial cops and some backup cops bring him to the ground, where they pin him down for four minutes. The problem is, as noted above, it was 114 degrees in Phoenix that day, and the process of pinning him down created significant third-degree burns over various parts of his body.

It’s detailed here: