Sucks but, hmm, I’m going with the context crowd.

The police may have been a*holes and not up to total standards, but they are not used to dealing with educated doctors, they are used to dealing with people, often dangerous, who have problems or want to make problems. Just a note, the “fact” that police shoot blacks %wise more than whites is dubious; not simple to actually tear apart, but dubious and probably false. What is “unjust” is not the enforcement but the economics that make the war on drugs more likely to hurt black neighborhoods than white. Laws can be fairly applied but unjust (a law that you can’t beg in the street applied to rich and poor alike). The war on drugs is deeply in this category.

In your case, if some officer walked up to your desk and asked to see your code, you’d probably tell him off, especially if he refused to identify himself. You might even get more belligerent, you might not have a purely professional response. If the officer had instead identified himself as (unexpectedly) a leading computer security expert working on some insidious Russian hack, he/she might get a different response.

With force, the officers have a stronger duty for professional response, but they are human and often under stress. They do seem to have reacted with way more force than necessary and it seems common for them to say that the arrestee is resisting, perhaps trying to cover themselves legally. The tone may also have already been set by body language that we all read consciously and subconsciously.

My medical training consists of life saving (swimming) and some disaster and wilderness first aid. I remember an repeated emphasis on at first doing nothing. Just really look and see what is there, what is happening, staying calm. They did several scenarios to drill that in.

Years later, I used it to save a guy who was drowning in a rip tide that I had to swim into which is a scare itself. But I stopped 10 feet away and observed his total panic and that fact that the guy was absolutely huge — a football player type. So I dove under, turned him around so he wouldn’t latch on and drown me. I then found I couldn’t do any of the proper procedures with him since he was just too big to even get my arm around. But, I figured out a way to calm him down and pull him by hair along the side until I found the current slack and pulled him in. All that old “stay calm and observe” training really worked. Only when I hit shore was I aware of how much adrenaline was surging and when it stopped, I collapsed for awhile, probably no blood sugar left.

I don’t know, rather than getting revenge, I’d try to get in some education to the department about mental illness, maybe if possible how to distinguish it from people who are stoned, and what can be done to handle such people. Maybe the cops would talk with you in the context of a legal settlement.