“Police chief puts high school girl in chokehold on sidewalk” is never a good look. But let’s roll back the videotape for some encouraging observations amid the police confrontation with peacefully protesting high schoolers in Quakertown, PA, on Friday.

We start with a bunch of teenagers, seemingly about 90% girls, protesting as they move through downtown. News outlets seem to have after-the-fact footage, but this skeet shows some crucial context, so use it to follow along.

🧵1/Student in Quakertown, PA held a peaceful protest yesterday until the police chief showed up in plain clothes and assaulted two students.#FuckICE #Quakertown #ProudBlue

— SaltyBitchables (@saltybitchables.bsky.social) 2026-02-21T20:35:00.318Z

We start with a white guy walking across the street to put hands on a girl. I do believe he has a police insignia on his vest. He’s obviously been watching them. It seems to me that he wants to single out one or two from the pack for arrest. My best interpretation is he accuses them of having been in the street unlawfully (and/or kicking tires, more on that later).

This seems like borderline judgment at best. For now.

But I picked this topic for what I saw next. Look at her friends immediately turn and confront.

And around 9 seconds in, look at the smallish African-American girl put herself front-and-center in the way between officer and friend, peacefully and intentionally taking the lead in contesting the officer’s reasoning. In short, that is not something we want to need, but it’s inspiring.

At 0:37, the officer’s backup has arrived, and he points to one or two in the crowd to apprehend. Easy to overlook here is that his pointing proves that the vast majority of the kids were doing nothing wrong.

The muscle enters the picture, including allegedly the local police chief in th unmarked tan shirt. They come in with zero subtlety, which provokes a response.

If young women are learning to never, ever just sit by while an unidentified white man starts to manhandle one of their own, then so be it, and I’ll pitch in to the bail GoFundMe.

At this point, the police’s borderline judgment has become just really bad judgment.

Next we see an officer throw a young man to the ground and keep him there, and the camera holds this focus. I think the officer felt comfortable treating him that way because he was a guy and not a girl.

You can see the guy explain that the police’s conduct toward the others is what prompted him to get in the way. He doesn’t fight; he just maintains eye contact and answers questions directly.

By the time the camera moves, the conflict has escalated a few feet away. We eventually see that the police chief has gotten on top of a young woman in an attempt to apprehend her, and someone drags her away.

Another officer is seemingly on top of the chief to protect him. The chief seems shook up. Uniformed officers have started to arrest some of the girls. That’s the end of the video, but other later recordings pick it up here.

The Kids Are Alright
By the way, reports quote a student and her mother about what was happening in the vicinity.

“Several trucks followed the students while yelling slurs and revving their engines, Cynthia said.

“At one point she saw students who were marching start running and yelling that they were being chased and attacked, Cynthia said.”

So as far as these reports and videos show, the principal of the school was right to try to “cancel” a walkout out of safety concerns. The “safety concerns” were stalker goons in cars heckling the group and the police officers who went in hamfisted over what I’m going to predict are trivial/bullshit allegations only to find more on their hands than they expected.

One online commenter said, “These kids will never forget this,” and that’s exactly right. They already had a social conscience, and police harassment only pours fuel on that flame.

These kids didn’t grow up inculcated with the same “conventional wisdom” about law enforcement as many of us did (and by us, in this case I mean suburban white kids). They obviously were not looking for trouble here, but they knew enough to judge what they were seeing for themselves and act accordingly, even at their own peril.

Thanks to the cell phone camera, anyone including these students could see the repeated misconduct/lies/coverup procedures in action on other streets in recent weeks. The unquestioning deference of past eras is out the window, and the country will be better for it. It already is, at least a little.

I, for one, believe they’re quite aware of what they’re going though.