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Grand Praire, TX — Rashaun A. Barnes had committed no crime and had harmed no one on the afternoon of July 31 when he was harassed and then attacked by police for no reason. The subsequent assault Barnes allegedly received from the officer has now left him permanently disfigured.

On that fateful afternoon, Barnes, 39, was standing on a public sidewalk outside of a neighborhood convenience store. That’s when, according to Barnes, he was approached by an officer who made him sit on the curb for absolutely no reason.

Even though he disagreed with the officer’s choice to harass him, Barnes complied with the officer’s orders. However, after Barnes says he sat there for 30 minutes in the brutal Texas heat — and never given a reason for the stop — he had enough and decided to walk home.

At this point, according to Barnes, the officer deployed his taser and everything went black.

Barnes woke up in an ambulance in severe pain with massive tissue damage to his face and arms. He was not accompanied by the officer who did this to him and he was never charged with a crime.

The cop simply assaulted him and moved on. However, Barnes is not standing for the abuse and he wants justice to be served.

As the Root reports, Civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, who represents the family of Jordan Edwards, the 15-year-old boy shot and killed by Balch Springs, Texas, Police Officer Roy Oliver in April, is also representing Barnes.

According to Merrit, the police department broke policy by failing to fill out an incident report. He is now calling for a full investigation into Barnes’ assault.

“This is a clear case of racial profiling and excessive force,” Merritt said. “The officer responsible must be immediately suspended and appropriately prosecuted. A full investigation into the incident must be conducted to determine what role other officers may have played in a cover up and/or violating departmental procedures concerning reporting the incident.”

Below are some of the graphic photos showing the injuries sustained by Barnes after the officer allegedly assaulted him.

In the video below Barnes explains the abuse he sustained that day. It is truly despicable.

When a police officer can walk up to a man on the street — who has done nothing wrong — detain, assault, and leave him permanently disfigured, something is terribly wrong. When this officer can do all these things and face no consequences and even make no record of it, the time for radical reform is now.

As the Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, minorities and poor people are the hardest hit when it comes to rampant police harassment. Time and time again, otherwise innocent people are targeted by police for revenue collection or to fish for crimes only to end up in the hospital or worse.

Police, we are told, are here to keep us safe and protect us from the bad guys. However, public safety all too often takes a back seat to revenue collection. Time and time again, the Free Thought Project has exposed quota schemes in which officers were punished for not writing enough tickets.

All too often we hear the ridiculous statement from the apologist crowd saying, “If you don’t break the law, you have nothing to worry about.”

However, that statement couldn’t be further from the truth. Just ask Barnes.

Former NSA official William Binney sums this myth up quite accurately, “The problem is, if they think they’re not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does.”

Attorney Harvey Silverglate argues that the average American commits three felonies a day without even knowing it.

While most everyone in America commits the same infractions designed for revenue collection, most of the people targeted by police for these crimes are the poor, minorities, and the mentally ill.

As the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson exposed, in 2013, African-Americans accounted for 86 percent of traffic stops, while making up only 63 percent of Ferguson’s population.

For those too poor to pay their tickets, routine traffic stops in Ferguson ended up in repeated imprisonment due to mounting fines. Ferguson was running a de facto debtors’ prison.

Revenue collection, persecution of the poor, and debtor’s prisons take place in every county, in every city, across every state. This institutionalized cruelty is little more than a day’s work for the millions of bureaucrats involved in the racket. Barnes just so happened to find himself right in the middle of it.

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