It’s not the sort of year-in-review list you want your state or city to be on: the now-infamous video of Houston Police Department officers beating teen burglary suspect, Brandon Holley, was named by the police watchdog group Injustice Everywhere as “the fifth worst-police misconduct video of 2011” on Saturday.
The organization posted more than eighty such videos in 2011, with its readers casting votes for 21 of the worst of them.
The actual incident took place in March 2010 and led to disciplinary action and firings, with four of the fired officers—Philip Bryan, Drew Reiser, Andrew Blomberg and Raad Hassanbeing—being indicted for misdemeanor offenses in June 2010. Holley, who was fifteen at the time of the incident, was convicted of the burglary in October of 2010, receiving two years probation.
But the video did not become public until February of 2011, when New Black Panther Party activist Quannel X released it, creating an uproar both for its content and the question of whether it should have been made public.
Here’s Houston TV station KTRK’s original airing of the video:
A motion to move the four officers’ trial out of Harris County, because the video and the associated media coverage might be prejudicial, was denied in August of 2011. That trial is now scheduled for April.
