Please, everyone, just talk normal. Please.

'It really rocks you to the core,' except when it doesn't

The Waterbury, Ct. police department fired one of its officers last week after he was found to have relentlessly berated a woman for running through an intersection in which he was directing traffic. Footage of the incident is not good—the cop comes off like a bitch, just whiny and childish and unserious, his anger seems just completely outsized relative to the brief traffic violation—but I’m not sure it was a firing offense. I’ve written elsewhere of the need to not fire people over the drop of a hat and it seems like that was the case here; this cop behaved exceptionally poorly and should have been forced to make a public apology and attend some kind of rigorous anger-management program or something, but beyond that I’m rather surprised that the police department fired him.

I think a large part of it might have been that he yelled like this at a woman. If he had yelled at a man I doubt the response would have been so severe. We have different standards for these sorts of things when it comes to men and women; it’s a different thing for a man to yell at a woman compared to a man yelling at another man, particularly when the two parties do not know each other. Everyone knows this and is okay with it—myself included—though for some reason it often makes people uncomfortable to point it out.