I’m sure most of you have heard by now of Malika Calhoun–the 15 year old African American girl that was beaten by police officers for kicking a shoe at them (which didn’t hit either officer). (possible trigger warning for the rest of the post)

Today she spoke on CBS. Please be warned before you watch the video that the full video of her beating is in the piece. It is triggering. Be careful watching (if you can’t watch, you can turn away from the screen, there’s no sound on the beating or, you could go here and read the transcript).

Watch CBS Videos Online

This is not new. Many people are confused, how could police brutality be about women except in the most existential way (i.e. a mother loses her son, a sister loses a brother, etc)? This is how. When a young girl is arrested (for eating a french fry, dropping cake on the floor, pretending parsley is pot, having sex with a boyfriend), the male with her is probably not going to be arrested–AND grown ass men feel perfectly comfortable beating the shit out of a female half their size–many times even raping her.

Two Officers Accused of Raping an Intoxicated Woman They Escorted Home

By MICHAEL WILSON and MATHEW R. WARREN
Published: March 1, 2009

Two police officers have been assigned to desk
duty while prosecutors and the police investigate
a complaint that at least one of them raped an
intoxicated woman after they escorted her into
her apartment in the East Village three months ago, the police said on Sunday.

Footage from a nearby bar’s video surveillance
camera shows the two officers helping the woman
into her building on Dec. 7 and returning twice
during the next two hours, according to the bar
owner, who provided the video to investigators.

The officers have been placed on modified duty
and have had to turn in their guns and badges
while investigators from the Police Department
and the Manhattan district attorney’s office look
into the accusations of rape and another=2 0
accusation of drug possession, the police said.
No arrests have been made, the police said.

“The Internal Affairs Bureau is conducting an
investigation of the allegations,” said Paul J.
Browne, the department’s chief spokesman. He
declined to identify the officers or say whether
they worked out of the Ninth Precinct, which
includes the neighborhood where the woman lives.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

Stephen C. Worth, a lawyer for one of the officers, denied the allegations.

“The district attorney’s office has taken some
time in investigating this matter, and it is my
expectation that at the conclusion of their
investigation, they will determine that no crime
was committed,” Mr. Worth said.

The owner of the bar, Heather Millstone, 34, said
she gave the district attorney’s office footage
from a camera near the door of the bar on East
13th Street after two women arrived on Dec. 7 and
said their friend had been attacked in her nearby
apartment early that morning. The woman, who her
friends said was in a hospital, had told them, “
‘I’ve been raped. It was the police,’ ” Ms. Millstone said.

The three of them watched the video, which
includes a time stamp, Ms. Millstone said, and
saw one officer arrive at 1:10 a.m. and open the
front door20of the building as a second officer
helped the intoxicated woman inside. The friends
said the woman had been sick in a taxicab, and
the cab driver had called 911, Ms. Millstone said.

“She’s really clearly impaired” Ms. Millstone said.

The officers can be seen leaving the building
seven minutes after they entered, she said. They
returned 39 minutes later, at 1:59 a.m., and
followed a resident who used a key to enter the
building, Ms. Millstone said. One officer looked
up and seemed to notice the camera, she said.

The officers can be seen leaving the second time
after 17 minutes, seeming to move quickly out of
the camera’s range, Ms. Millstone said.

The officers can be seen returning to the
building the third time at 2:59 a.m., this time
entering with a key, Ms. Millstone said. “They’re
coming in from behind the camera, so that their
backs are to the camera,” she said.

The officers are seen leaving the building 34
minutes later, at 3:33 a.m., for the last time, she said.

“We made copies of the video,” she said. “I gave
the copies to her friends so she could give them
to her lawyer and the lawyer could take them directly to the D.A.’s office.”

She said soon afterward she received a call from
the district attorney’s office, “and they started their investigation.=E 2

News of the investigation was reported on Sunday
in The New York Post and The New York Daily News.

Mr. Worth declined to comment on the video, and
refused to identify the lawyer for the other officer.

One of the officers also faces an allegation of
drug possession after heroin was found in his
locker during a search that followed the
complaint, Mr. Browne said. Mr. Worth declined to
comment on that allegation. A spokesman for the
police officers’ union declined to comment on the case.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg mentioned the
investigation on Sunday while speaking to
reporters outside a church in Brooklyn. “It is a
very serious charge, obviously, and I don’t want
to prejudice anything, but you can rest assured
that the Internal Affairs Bureau is working very
hard and doing an investigation,” he said.

Martin Kynaston, an owner of Drop Off Service, a
bar near the one owned by Ms. Millstone, said
detectives visited him in December and asked for
video footage, but would not say why.

“The police said we’d read about it in the newspapers,” Mr. Kynaston said.
Recommend Next Article in New York Region (6 of
16) » A version of this article appeared in print
on March 2, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.

Again, police raping women they are supposed to be protecting is not unusual.

When a woman of color who knows what happens when her friends are arrested, who has held hands with friends who have been assaulted by officers, who doesn’t know what to do when she finds her own self pushed up against a police car with a man’s fingers up her private area (yes, this has happened), where is this woman supposed to turn to when she finds herself getting beaten by her partner? Or her child falls off a bed and needs an ambulance to get to a hospital?

As the mother of a mouthy girl, sweet JESUS when are we going to wake up and recognize the very real THREAT our girls are living under?