I’d especially encourage anyone inclined to regard the incident as excessive force to watch video of Chief McMillin thoughtfully expressing his perspective at length:

I find his perspective compelling.

And according to a police statement, “Two officers responded and saw Jose Velasco slamming the female's body into the pavement of the northbound lane of North Main Street while heavy traffic was passing by. As the officers tried to get Velasco off of his mother by pulling him away, Velasco began to violently resist and attacked the officers."

For now, let’s assume that account is correct. Does it justify what happened next?At the beginning of the clip, the suspect appears to be resisting arrest and lunging at the cops. If so, body blows with a baton are perfectly defensible. But focus on the police officer who runs into the frame at the 29 second mark. At that point the unarmed suspect is laying on the ground surrounded by four policemen. It’s hard to definitively say if he’s still resisting or just writhing around under body blows, but he doesn’t appear to represent a threat to the public or the police, and it’s hard to imagine that the four of them couldn’t get him into custody without more baton blows.

In fairness, the video is partially obscured as he gets more baton blows until the 42 second mark. At that point, he is visibly pinned down and restrained. Yet the tall, white police officer on the far right commences still more baton strikes at the 45 second mark. If nothing else, those last four or five blows strike me as obviously excessive.

Jeff Mitchell, a columnist at The Salinas Californian, sees things differently. While he criticizes the conduct of various police officers who’ve found themselves in national headlines, as well as two Salinas cops involved in relatively recent shootings, he came away from the video more sympathetic to the police.

“People see this video and assume that jack-booted thugs with badges and guns are back at work out there,” he writes, but “the officers, after having their verbal commands and two Taser strikes ignored, began beating the man with their batons... And even then all the strikes were focused on Velasco's legs and arms — save one that inadvertently hit his head when he moved at the last moment, according to police.”

He continues:

Finally, when enough officers arrived, they were able to put the man under control. And I say “control” lightly, because he continued to fight even while physically secured on the gurney. In fact, he was so out of control that doctors at Natividad Medical Center had to “chemically restrain” him when he arrived at the emergency room, police said. So yes, the video going around is ugly. The “optics” in things like these are never good. You have to ask yourself though, what would have happened if the police ignored the call and let Velasco—who later told officers he had been smoking methamphetamine and drinking alcohol right before the incident—kill his mother or cause other harm to motorists and pedestrians—or himself, for that matter? How would we all be reacting to that today?

To me, that is a false choice. The public should not have to choose between police officers who keep beating criminals past what is necessary to subdue them and cops who don’t show up at all. Nor should the Salinas community “give our cops the benefit of the doubt” (as Mitchell urged near the end of his column).