Just in time for the summer tourist season, the weather is heating up in Ocean City, Maryland, and so is the level of police violence against young people of color. As depicted in two recent viral videos, Ocean City police have apparently taken to enforcing a new ordinance restricting public vaping with a vengeance, Tasering and violently assaulting young men who dare to vape in public when they apparently fail to comply rapidly enough for the cops’ liking.

As Ana and Cenk point out in this clip, the police in both videos seem intent on escalating, rather than de-escalating, the violence, first by Tasering one young man who appears to merely be standing still with his arms raised and in the other by violently and repeatedly kneeing a boy who has been handcuffed and is already being restrained by multiple officers. Cenk says the videos merely underscore the point he frequently makes that even the whiff of disrespect toward an officer is enough for many — especially people of color — to receive a beating and often worse. Yet many in this country, he adds, refuse to see anything wrong with the culture of policing in this country.

Ana takes the opportunity to remind viewers that despite the unprecedented protests during the summer of 2020, policing has changed very little and all the murals and Black Lives Matter signs have not resulted in much concrete action to curtail police violence. The only way to effect actual change, she says, is to keep up the protesting and the pressure because symbolic gestures are not getting through to the kind of cops patrolling places like Ocean City and elsewhere.