Kat Biggs: People Against Police Brutality 12/16/2020
ProtestBlog.org: Anti-blackness and violent policing may have some of their most visible expressions in the U.S. given the nation’s outsized visibility on the global stage, but by no means are these issues limited to America. The latest evidence of this is the brutal treatment that Insecure actor Kendrick Sampson appears to have received at the hand of police in the South American nation Colombia on Tuesday.
Sampson reposted video footage on his Instagram page on Tuesday night that shows a uniformed officer in the city of Cartagena holding him by the arm and then suddenly punching him in the face and then pulling a weapon. In a caption accompanying the video, Sampson revealed that he’d been in the city for five days at that point and had already been stopped six times by police. “It happens to Black Colombians often,” he shared. “I’m told stopping is the policy, but what is NOT is they reached down my underwear aggressively, slap my arms five times hard, punch me in my jaw.”
Kendrick said the police then cuffed him and dragged him through the streets though he was not resisting. It isn’t yet clear if Sampson is completely free of the Colombia police’s custody, but he posted to his Instagram that he spent the night at his hotel being questioned by different officers who were seeking his account of the incident.