Many law enforcement officers across the country have been acting uncharacteristically lately. While their job is to serve and protect, some use their power to perform scare tactics and intimidate people who are not even breaking any serious laws. One of these situations happened in New York, where a fruit vendor was attempting to sell her fruit inside a subway station, but was stopped by two NYPD officers. However, instead of asking her to pack up her product and leave, they took this woman’s livelihood and threw it in the garbage in front of everyone.
As you can see in the video, two NYPD officers are grabbing a fruit vendor’s product and throwing it into the garbage. While selling products of any kind is illegal if you don’t have a permit, according to the MTA, there are different ways to deal with such matters. In the video, the two MTA members decided to grab the woman’s product and dump it inside a bin. This is wasteful everywhere you look at it, and the wisest choice would’ve been to let the woman go. Furthermore, if this is the woman’s only livelihood, she just lost her daily or maybe weekly income, but the police officers didn’t seem to care at all.
While some context regarding the fruit vendor’s permit would’ve helped us understand the situation better, the officers’ actions are shameful, and you can even hear how the one recording agrees with that. In the video, the one behind the camera tells the cops, “This is disgusting. It is such a disgusting move.” And the police officer replies, “Why did you give her money?” Implying it is the customer’s fault. The person who recorded the video continues to engage the officers, trying to shame them for throwing the woman’s product away instead of letting her keep it or maybe even seizing it to give it to someone who needs it.
As you can imagine, this disgraceful behaviour caught the attention of many people online, who were quick to point out just how poor the state of the country is.
“WTF is wrong with society 🤬.” Said one Reddit user.
“Jesus, all that perfectly good fruit wasted, while destroying someone’s livelihood. Shameful.” Said another person.
If the vendor was selling her fruit illegally, then she definitely was at fault. Still, the police officers didn’t have to destroy her livelihood. Still, with how other agencies are using scare tactics against citizens, it was only a matter of time before other law enforcement organizations followed suit.
