The victim of last week’s burning, Sofia Blakewood, was arrested and thrown in jail for attempting to report the vicious crime that had left her with second degree burns through out the left side of her body. When she approached an officer who had been on his break at the time, requesting to make a report, she’d been met with initial resistance.
Unaware of how to make a formal report, she mistook his demand that she ‘go do it’ as a request to report the incident to him. This misunderstanding would prove to be significant as, moments later, she was arrested and locked up for her troubles. To the right is the series of pictures captured of this brutal crime, and now Blakewood has added injuries and jail time to the list of indecencies enacted upon her.
While the officer involved was within his rights to direct her to another officer to take her report, perhaps, it is worth noting that these continuous acts of escalated brutality are exactly the reason the people of Hathian do not feel safe. If we cannot trust the very institutions that are in place to protect us as citizens, how can we be expected to ask for help, or offer it? In many cases there are those who would rather die than involve the police, which has acquired a reputation for corruption, lack of professionalism and cruelty with almost daily reports of abuse of power and incarcerations with slim to no basis in law.
While not all members of the Hathian Police Department are corrupt, there are enough of them that it’s visible even to those who are merely drifting through the city on their way somewhere else; and what stories do they tell? Do they speak of heroism, or of the greed and brutality? Are we paying our hard-made tax dollars to a public civil service, or to a mob of thugs? The people who live and work in the city would argue the latter.
What can we do, but watch the corruption eating it’s way through the very heart of the city, tainting what should be a shining light for hope into a trap for the innocent, disenfranchised and vulnerable, when those voices for truth are often the first to be silenced.
