A man drowned to death in a Tempe park,
as cops essentially just watched it happen and refused to help.
The cops have been placed on administrative leave, as always.
But their union is actually defending their decision to literally stand there
and watch a man drown to death and refuse to intervene.
Now first, let's set up the story, what happened?
Well, police responded to a disturbance between Sean Bickings and
a woman who has now been identified as his wife.
Apparently, they were in some sort of dispute, at the Tempe Center for
the Arts, which actually sits on a promenade alone or along, I should say,
the Tempe Town Lake, okay?
So that is a reservoir.
And the cops show up, they try to figure out what the dispute is.
His wife tells them, everything's fine, we just had a disagreement.
There's no abuse, nothing's wrong.
Body-camera footage released by the city shows officers approach and
speak to a woman who identified herself as Bickings's wife.
As she picked up her belongings off the ground, she explained that she and
Bickings sometimes have disagreements but said that he did not physically harm her.
By the way, Bickings was described as unsheltered, so homeless.
And so two of the officers then walked over to Bikings who was seated on
a bench facing the water, according to the body-camera footage.
By this point, the officers were running the couple's names for
outstanding warrants, which is apparently standard procedure, according to the city.
The police later said Bickings had three outstanding warrants.
But this is important.
Those didn't actually come up during Bickings's encounter with the police.
They found out about the warrants after the fact.
Now that's when Bickings decided to slowly climb over the short
fence dividing the boardwalk and the water.
When one of the officers asked, what are you doing?
Bickings said, I'm free to go, right?
And so,
what you're about to see is what happens next based on the body-cam surveillance.
Let's take a quick look at that and then I'll explain more.
[INAUDIBLE] go right?
You can't swim in the lake man.
You're not allowed to swim in the lake.
How far do you think he's gonna be able to swim?
You guys got an eye?
[INAUDIBLE]
Pretty sure there's like
turbines at the base of the dam
that could suck [INAUDIBLE]
I don't know.
So, they cut the body-cam footage after that.
They say it's too disturbing to release to the public.
I think they should release it.
And the reason why I say that is because the public deserves to know exactly what
happened.
They released a transcript of what happened afterwards.
And I wanna get to that transcript.
Cenk, let me read the transcript first and then I'll go to you.
Cuz I think that's the most important part of this story.
So, Bickings told the officers he was going to drown according to
the transcript.
No, you're not, an officer identified as Officer 2 replied.
Officer 1 then directed Bickings to go to the pylon and hold on.
I'm drowning, Bicking said.
Come back over to the pylon, Officer 2 said.
I can't Bickings said.
I can't.
Okay, I'm not jumping in after you, Officer 1 said.
And he didn't.
And as you guys can probably already tell, the cops have not been identified yet.
Bickings then begged for help and said moments later, I cant touch.
God. Please help me.
Help me.
And they did not.
And eventually his partner got involved and begged them to help her husband.
And of course they refused to do so,
they were annoyed with her demands and it's just incredibly tragic.
And the union of course is defending the cops to say, well,
it would have been very dangerous for them to jump in the water.
And you can hear from the video that we played,
that one of the cops was concerned about possible turbines in the water that could
have been sucking him down into the water.
Because in the beginning of the video, you can see him swimming and
he looks like a good swimmer.
I don't know if the turbines really exist.
That's unclear at the moment.
But what I do know, is you have three cops there,
three cops are now on administrative leave, who just refused to do anything.
Okay, so let's understand the logic of the cops here.
They said it was too disturbing to release to the public.
The video of him drowning.
But apparently it was not disturbing enough for
them to actually try to save his life.
So we can't even see how awful it was as he was drowning.
But the cops saw it in real life and were like, don't care.
Not going in after you.
Don't care at all, you're dying.
What am I? A cop, is here to save you?
So which one is it?
If it's so horrific that the public can't see it, well,
obviously the cop did something wrong, right?
Nope, cop did something perfectly fine.
They said, well if he had gone in, he might have lost his own life.
My God, if you're a cop, you might have to risk your life.
Yes, that's supposed to be part of the job.
But I've told you guys this 100 times, a million times and
no one's ever going to fix this.
Biden, all the Democrats, all the Republicans are too busy kissing the cops
asses and shoveling more money towards them.
No, no, you're being super unfair to them because they also knew and
can't take cloths.
And do performative politics and theater.
So, great job with that.
So the reality is, all the cops in this country are trained,
you're more important than the citizens, do not ever risk anything,
even any kind of harm to save the life of a lowly citizen.
Well of course, unless they're rich,
then you must risk everything to protect them and their property, okay?
But if you're middle class or poor, just let them drown, who cares?
You're not gonna get in any trouble at all.
Better to be judged by 12 than carried out by six.
Who cares?
That's what we teach our cops.
Because, I'll tell you guys, most people jump in to save the guy,
unless they're trained to be callous.
Unless they're trained to not give a crap about other people's lives.
And that's what we do with our cops.
We're like, remember guys, no one else is important.
Only you, you are the most important.
No your whole job is supposed to be to risk your life for others,
otherwise go be a goddamn accountant.
It's a perfectly noble job.
Just sit there with numbers.
You don't have to risk your life at all, okay?
Now, let's get to the horrifying details.
He might get sucked in by turbines.
That wasn't a cop, that was a citizen that was there.
Cops is like, yeah, whatever man.
Okay, you say look, I get it in the beginning,
you go to do this to look into a disturbance.
Maybe they fought but now they're telling you they aren't.
You're looking up the warrants, no problem.
The guy jumps in, that's a giant pain in the ass.
I got it, I got it, no problem, okay?
And then you tell him not to swim out and he's still swimming out.
That sucks.
Am I getting on the cops for not jumping in at that point?
No, but when the when the guy says I'm drowning,
maybe you don't believe him in the beginning.
Give him as much leeway as you want, right?
But when you don't see him come out of the water for
30 seconds and you say it on the tape and you start to worry that he's gonna drown.
That's when you jump in, you've got to jump in there.
But then you don't see him for minutes.
You gotta jump in.
You gotta jump in if you don't see him for minutes.
Hurry up, time is ticking.
He told you he was drowning and now it looks like he is drowning.
Get in there.
And he said, no, no, I might get a hangnail, I might get a paper cut.
I'm gonna get wet, that's kind of a pain in my ass, to save a life?
That's not my life, what do I care?
I'm a cop.
And that's the actual decision they made.
And if you're looking for consequences, it would be shocking if they were fired.
Right, as I mentioned,
the police union has already run interference on behalf of the cops.
I'll get to that in one second.
But I just wanted to give you a statement from the transcript from Bickings's wife.
So she's begging them to help, begging them to save her husband.
And she says quote, he's everything I got, I can't lose him, he's going to die.
Now, since he was described as unsheltered,
I'm gonna assume that she's also unsheltered.
Imagine having literally nothing other than your partner and
you're standing there with people who could help save him and
they just watch him die and you watch him die along with them.
Begging them, begging them for help and they refused to do it.
Now in the aftermath, as I mentioned, they have been placed on administrative leave.
The Tempe Officers Association, the City's Police Union said in a statement that,
Bickings's drowning was an awful loss of life.
The union argued however, that the officers were not trained or
equipped for a water rescue and said that an attempt
to rescue Bickings from the reservoir would have been dangerous.
What I'm also curious about is,
they didn't even bother to call anyone else for help.
They claim that they called like a boat and a fire department et cetera.
But it's gonna take hours for them to get,
you know when they fished him out of the water?
Six hours later, nobody jumped in, nobody jumped in.
Nobody cared.
They say, it might be dangerous.
Yeah, your job is supposed to be dangerous.
It's like the Fire Department going,
what do you want us to rush into a burning building to save kids and people?
That's the job.
Yes, that's the job.
If you don't wanna do the job, then go away and get fired and
go do something else.
I'm gonna read you the exact quote from the Tempe Officers Association.
They said quote, attempting such a high risk rescue could easily result
in the death of the person in the water and
the officer who could be pulled down by a struggling adult.
Wow.
You could be in a little bit of danger.
Yeah, that's why you're a cop.
Don't ever tell me the cop is the most dangerous job.
It's the easiest, cushiest,
least risky job in the world where we talked to teach them to be callous
monsters who should never ever take any risk with them their lives.
And let civilians die and go, my God, hey, look, it's a 12 year old boy.
What are we gonna do?
Ask him if it's a toy gun or if it's nothing, just shoot him dead.
Who cares?
That's Tamir Rice, and we can give you hundreds of examples.
So now people have lost faith in police.
I mean, if you're rich, you haven't lost faith, they'll protect your mansion,
don't worry, right?
But if you're poor and middle class, now you're stuck,
you have criminals everywhere.
But you're afraid that if you call the cops, a, they're not gonna show up and b,
if they do, they might hurt you.
So we're all screwed.
And no one is gonna do anything about it.
This is as dark as I have ever seen America.
Because the Republicans love all of this dysfunction and
the fact that the country has turned into a barbaric hellscape where poor and
middle class are crushed by corporate rule.
Day in, day out.
And the only people that are protected are the rich and the powerful.
The Republicans love it, they live for it.
And the Democrats are indifferent.
It's just cash, checks.
Did the corporate donors send the money?
Yeah, great.
Now we're not gonna do anything about police reform.
Let them drown.
Let them get shot in the school.
We're not gonna do any gun control.
We're not gonna do voting rights, were not gonna do higher wages.
We're not gonna do anything that we lied about.
The corporate media comes in and says, it's all okay everybody,
move along everybody, move along.
It's all okay.
This is perfectly normal.
It's not normal.
This is barbaric.