We need a movement to ban horse cops
I'm curious whether a movement to ban the uses of horses by cops would work in the city of LA after the events of the last few weeks.
There's been a shocking number of graphically violent images of police beating people from horseback, charging into crowds, trampling injured people, deliberately moving their horses to trample people, etc.
Horses are extraordinarily dangerous and are a vector by which police can launder their violence through the use of the animal. It's pretty easy to see from some of these videos how the police might be deliberately moving their animals to create injuries which look "accidental" or inescapable - "what were you expecting? You should have gotten out of the way!" style injuries.
Furthermore, it's clearly not the greatest for the animals!! to use horses in this way.
This blog covers the use of horses in this context... as well as the recent decision by the LAPD to acquire another horse. I think a campaign to ban the use of horses by police in this city is a winning strategy. We've got a lot of really intense, brand-new video of the abuse of protestors (and frankly of horses) by mounted police. (There are plenty of older ones, too - the BLM protests were full of horse incidents.) Here is a very short list of some from the last few weeks in LA. You can find others in the blog post above.
Cops charge peaceful crowd with horses
An MSNBC journalist is interviewing a poster-holder near the police line when the police begin charging at them and firing pepper balls. I first found this video on Reddit here.
Cops trample and beat downed protestor with horses and sticks
In this video, a cop press conference plays on the left side of the screen while, on the right side, a group of mounted police deliberately move their horses in an attempt to trample a protester who has been knocked onto the ground. They also beat the protestor with sticks. A slice of inescapably American cognitive dissonance preserved in video.
Mounted police charge crowd... again
There are just so many of these moments!! You'll notice that the crowd are not particularly armored-up protestors or anything - there's a lot of people with bike helmets and so on, but there's also just a confused guy with a bike, a woman in a miniskirt, people without masks, just holding flags and even wearing sandals or flipflops... these are people who turned up to do completely ordinary protesting.