#Minneapolis Head Injury Lawyers

[wilsoninjury]

At Robert Wilson & Associates, our Minnesota wrongful death attorneys have the experience, knowledge to help you with your family to develop a strong wrongful death lawsuit for your loss. Call today at 612-334-3444.

[seijohsremade]

ways to help protestors if you are unable to protest

everybody has to do their part. as a reference, this was posted on 1 june 2020. if any links are broken or direct to a place they should not, please feel free to add on with corrections. if there is new information with better knowledge, please feel free to share. thank you.

1. donate

do not donate to shaun king. he has repeatedly collected money to “support” black people, but no one knows where the money is.

BAIL FUNDS (ALPHABETICAL ORDER; NOT A COMPREHENSIVE LIST)

note: washington dc and new jersey have cashless bail systems.

bail fund google doc (also includes lawyers for protestors)

national bail fund network (directory of community bail funds)

community bail funds masterpost by @keplercryptids

resistance funds (google sheets; lists bail funds around the country)

nationwide bail funds (split a donation to the bail funds listed on the linked page with a single transaction)

atlanta bail fund

brooklyn bail fund

colorado freedom fund

columbus freedom fund

houston chapter of black lives matter

liberty fund (nyc based; focuses services on people from low-income communities)

los angeles freedom fund

louisville community fund

massachusetts bail fund

minnesota freedom fund (as of may 30, 2020, they are encouraging people to donate elsewhere since they have raised enough money; as of may 29, 2020, they do not have a venmo, as some fraudulent accounts have been claiming, source)

philadelphia bail out fund

richmond bail fund

MORE PLACES TO DONATE

note: more links are listed in the masterposts below.

northstar health collective (healthcare and medical aid for people on the front lines)

reclaim the block (aims to redistribute police funding to help the minneapolis community)

twin cities dsa (provides fresh groceries and hot meals to people in minneapolis)

2. educate yourself

it isn’t enough to sign petitions and reblog/retweet/etc. nonblack people, including people of color, owe it to black people to educate themselves and correct themselves and the people around them on anti-blackness.

note: more links are in the masterposts linked below.

resources and tools regarding racism and anti-blackness (google sheets compilation)

readings on society, racism, the prison system, etc. (twitter thread)

“where do we go after ferguson?” by michael eric dyson

official black lives matter website

3. give out supplies to protestors

people need supplies to protest safely, and even if they bring supplies with them, they can often run out. if you’re able, stock up and hand them out to people protesting. for more supplies to donate, see the “george floyd action” google docs link in section 5.

water bottles (dehydration and heatstroke are not things people should have to deal with alongside bastard cops. if the police in your area are particularly violent or known to use tear gas, get the ones with the sports cap/suction-thing/etc so people can use them as emergency eye-flushes.)

snacks (make sure to take into account that people have allergies of all sorts. foods will have a little label that says “may contain” and then list any potential allergens. write the allergens on the ziploc (or any container you use) in permanent marker, or better yet, write the snacks included in the pack.)

masks (don’t forget there’s still a pandemic going on. also it will aid in deterring facial recognition when the police try to track down protestors,  also part two, if the cops use tear gas, wearing a mask (with the combination of a scarf or bandana) will lessen the adverse effects. lessen, not stop.)

bandanas, scarves, etc. and goggles (ski goggles, swimming goggles, etc.) (see above for explanation on the scarves. same goes for the goggles. anti–tear gas and anti–facial recognition.)

clean shirts (for people who are heavily gassed. also helps deter recognition through clothing.)

wound care supplies (band-aids, packets of neosporin packets or a similar antibiotic, alcohol wipes, etc.; if you can, decant bactine into those little travel bottles.)

a sharpie or another type of marker (for writing bail numbers or emergency contacts on arms, hands, etc. it’s not enough to have your city’s bail fund number stored on your phone; the police won’t give it to you to look it up. give people a marker so they can write it down, preferably not washable so it isn’t easily removed.)

IMPORTANT: KNOWING FIRST AID

tear gas: if you’re hit, get out as fast and as soon as you can. take anyone you can with you. the longer you’re in the gas, the harder it will be for you to see, and it can irritate your airways, making it hard to breathe. if you’re hit, don’t run; it’ll only make things worse on your lungs. when you leave the area, take a cold shower. don’t use hot water (it will only reactivate the agent); don’t bathe (it will only spread the CS around). (source 1) (source 2) (cdc fact sheet on tear gas)

move them to a clean and ventilated area where it’s as safe as possible.

ask them if they’re wearing contact lenses. have them remove it. if they’re wearing glasses, rinse it with water.

solution of half liquid antacid, half water. spray from the inside going out, with the head tilted back and slightly towards the side being rinsed. if they say it’s okay, open the eye slightly while doing this. (source)

bullet wounds: the most important thing is to stop the bleeding. be sure to check for an exit wound and cover that as well. treat both wounds, but treat the worse one first.

stop the bleed (youtube video by uc san diego health)

first aid in active shooting scenarios

making a tourniquet (a commercial tourniquet is best, but improvised ones can work as well if done properly; the most important things to remember is that tourniquets are for limb injuries and are not meant for the head or torso and that they have to be very tightly wound on the injury.)

how to apply pressure dressings

miscellaneous

adult cpr tutorial (youtube video by cincinnati children’s; think of “staying alive” by the beegees or “uptown funk”)

4. be a source of information

be responsible with this. people’s lives are at stake. that being said, the media is a fucking joke and the best way to get accurate information in a grassroots rebellion is amongst ourselves. record everything, but if you are going to share any information at all, be sure to blur people’s faces.

signal (encrypted messenger app; messages delete after x amount of time): app store | google play

tool for scrubbing metadata from images and selectively blurring identifiable features

tech tips to protect yourself while protesting (by rey.nbows on tiktok, via vicent_efl on twitter)

cop spotting 101 (google docs)

know your rights (by personachuu on twitter)

NUMBERS TO CALL FOR ARRESTED PROTESTORS (ALPHABETICAL ORDER; SOURCES LINKED TO THE NUMBER)

remember to keep phones OFF unless absolutely necessary. cell phone towers, stingrays, location notifs can all be used to track you and other protestors. don’t fuck around. if your phone must be on, keep it on airplane mode as often as possible and only communicate using encrypted methods. no, snapchat doesn’t count. (a twitter thread on stingrays, for those interested)

lawyers assisting protestors pro-bono (by riyakatariax on twitter)

atlanta: 404-689-1519

chicago: 773-309-1198

minneapolis: 612-444-2654

5. miscellaneous links and links for protestors

masterpost of petitions to sign, numbers to call, places to donate, and more (carrd by dehyedration on twitter)

#blacklivesmatter (google docs by ambivaIcnt on twitter; includes information on relevant events, other masterposts, lists of petitions and donation links, how to protest safely and protests to go to, and more)

george floyd action (google docs; includes information on apps to download, supplies to buy and donate, places to donate to, protest safety, resources on unlearning racial bias, and more)

how to get out of ziptie “handcuffs” (by finnianj on tiktok, via katzerax on twitter)

how can i help? by @abbiheartstaylor

how to make a signal-blocking cell phone pouch

tips for protestors by @aurora00boredealis

twitter thread for protestors (by vantaemuseum on twitter)

also, if you’re protesting, change your passcode. make it at least 11 characters long and don’t use facial/thumb recognition.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

World refugee numbers rise (Foreign Policy) A new report by the United Nations refugee agency found that the number of refugees worldwide increased by 9 million in 2019, adding to a total of roughly 80 million people. Only 107,000 refugees were resettled in third countries, with Canada receiving the most with 31,100. The United States received the second highest number with 27,500 resettled in 2019.

Migrant farmworkers die in Canada, and Mexico wants answers (Washington Post) Each summer for the past five years, Aaron has traveled from his home in Mexico to Canada as one of the tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers who seed, tend and harvest the crops that keep the country fed. This year’s journey was unique. Flights were limited. There were temperature screenings and questionnaires before he took off and after he landed. On arriving in British Columbia this month, he was checked into a hotel for a 14-day quarantine. But in this year of the coronavirus, the precautions have not kept all of Canada’s migrant farmworkers safe. At least 600 have contracted covid-19, and at least two, both Mexicans, have died. Mexico, which provides nearly half of Canada’s migrant farmworkers, has become so concerned that officials said this week they’re hitting the “pause button” on plans to send up to 5,000 more to Canada until they’re satisfied the conditions that led to the deaths will be rectified—threatening a labor crunch for Canada’s already squeezed agricultural sector. The pandemic has highlighted Canada’s dependence on the 60,000 temporary foreign workers who arrive each year from countries such as Mexico and Jamaica as part of a federal government program, and without whom hundreds of thousands of tons of blueberries, asparagus stalks and grapes would wither on the vine.

DACA lives on (NYT) When this country started hearing a decade ago about Dreamers—people who came to the United States as small children without legal permission—many of them were in their teens or early 20s. These Dreamers are now full adults, with careers and families, and many have spent years anxiously wondering whether they would be thrown out of the only country they’ve really known. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, which barred President Trump from deporting the Dreamers anytime soon, came as a tremendous relief to them. “It feels amazing,” Vanessa Pumar, 31, an immigration lawyer who came from Venezuela at age 11, said. “I have been holding my breath. It feels like I can finally breathe.” Roberto G. Gonzales, a Harvard professor who has been studying DACA since it went into effect in 2012, calls it “the most successful immigration policy in recent decades.” Gonzales explains: “Within a year, DACA beneficiaries were already taking giant steps. They found new jobs. They increased their earnings. They acquired driver’s licenses. And they began to build credit through opening bank accounts and obtaining credit cards.”

AP-NORC poll: Majority of Americans support police protests (AP) Ahead of the Juneteenth holiday weekend’s demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality, a majority of Americans say they approve of recent protests around the country. Many think they’ll bring positive change. And despite the headline-making standoffs between law enforcement and protesters in cities nationwide, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds a majority of Americans think law enforcement officers have generally responded to the protests appropriately. Somewhat fewer say the officers used excessive force. The findings follow weeks of peaceful protests and unrest in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died pleading for air on May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes. A dramatic change in public opinion on race and policing has followed, with more Americans today than five years ago calling police violence a very serious problem that unequally targets black Americans.

Atlanta police call out sick over charges in fatal shooting (AP) Atlanta police officers called out sick to protest the filing of murder charges against an officer who shot a man in the back, while the interim chief acknowledged members of the force feel abandoned amid protests demanding massive changes to policing. Interim Chief Rodney Bryant told The Associated Press in an interview that the sick calls began Wednesday night and continued Thursday, but said the department had sufficient staff to protect the city. It’s not clear how many officers called out. “Some are angry. Some are fearful. Some are confused on what we do in this space. Some may feel abandoned,” Bryant said of the officers. “But we are there to assure them that we will continue to move forward and get through this.”

Beware the trampoline (NYT) Sales of outdoor equipment has surged as families try to keep their children entertained while on lockdown. But that has led to a spike in injuries from bikes, scooters, and especially trampolines. Some E.R. doctors have begun referring to trampolines as “orthopedic fracture machines.” Many injuries occur when multiple children, especially a mix of older and younger ones, are jumping on a trampoline at the same time. That’s what happened to the daughter of our colleague Adam Pasick, who broke her tibia on a trampoline on Wednesday. Stay safe out there, kids!

Missing in Mexico (Foreign Policy) Families of people thought to have gone missing amid Mexico’s drug war surrounded a motorcade carrying President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the state of Veracruz on Monday demanding he do more to bring their loved ones home. Some 61,000 people are estimated to be missing in the country, and relatives fear that austerity measures, which could see a 75 percent budget cut to a government agency that provides funding and support to families of the disappeared, will only make matters worse. While coronavirus-related lockdowns have stalled search efforts, gang violence and disappearances have continued.

France and Turkey spar over ship incident (Foreign Policy) Tensions between France and Turkey rose after French Defense Minister Florence Parly said a Turkish ship refused to identify itself and its mission after an approach by a French vessel on a NATO mission to check on suspected weapons smuggling to Libya. Turkish sailors donned bulletproof vests and took up positions behind light weaponry during the incident, according to Parly. “This act was extremely aggressive and cannot be one of an ally facing another ally who is doing its work under NATO command,” Parly said. Turkey called France’s claims “baseless.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that NATO is investigating the incident “to bring full clarity into what happened.”

Anger Surges in India Over Deadly Border Brawl With China (NYT) An Indian government minister has called for Chinese restaurants to be closed. Other Indian officials have suddenly put contracts to Chinese companies under review. And crowds of men are now smashing Chinese-made televisions in the street. A wave of anti-Chinese anger is cresting across India as the nation struggles to absorb the loss of 20 Indian soldiers beaten to death this week by Chinese troops in a high-altitude brawl along India’s disputed border with China. And the tensions are hardly easing. Sonam Joldan, a teacher in the Ladakh region near the India-China border, reported on Thursday seeing a line of 100 Indian Army trucks heading toward the front line, wending its way up the Himalayan mountains “like a caravan of ants.”

China charges Canadians with espionage (Foreign Policy) Chinese prosecutors announced today that they have charged two Canadians in Chinese detention with espionage. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have been held by Chinese authorities since 2018 in what is seen as a reciprocal move by Beijing after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, by Canadian police. Meng is currently under house arrest in Vancouver while fighting a Canadian court battle to halt her extradition to the United States.

Singapore opens gyms, dining out as China outbreak steadies (AP) Singaporeans can wine and dine at restaurants, work out at the gym and socialize with no more than five people at a time as of Friday, when the city-state removed most of its pandemic lockdown restrictions. Getting back to business in Singapore came as China declared a fresh outbreak in Beijing under control after confirming 25 new cases among some 360,000 people tested. That was up by just four from a day earlier. Singapore’s malls, gyms, massage parlors, parks and other public facilities reopened their doors with strict social distancing and other precautions.

Palestinians fear displacement from an annexed Jordan Valley (AP) For generations, the people of Fasayil herded animals on the desert bluffs and palm-shaded lowlands of the Jordan Valley. Today, nearly every man in the Palestinian village works for Jewish settlers in the sprawling modern farms to the north and south. The grazing lands to the west and east, leading down to the banks of the biblical Jordan River, have been swallowed up by the settlements or fenced off by the Israeli military. So instead of leading sheep out to pasture, the men rise before dawn to work in the settlements for around $3 an hour—or they move away. “Everyone here works in the settlements, there’s nothing else,” said Iyad Taamra, a member of the village council who runs a small grocery store. “If you have some money you go somewhere else where there is a future.” Palestinians fear communities across the Jordan Valley will meet a similar fate if Israel proceeds with its plans to annex the territory, which accounts for around a quarter of the occupied West Bank and was once seen as the breadbasket of a future Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex the valley and all of Israel’s far-flung West Bank settlements, in line with President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan, which overwhelmingly favors Israel and has been rejected by the Palestinians. The process could begin as soon as July 1.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince uses travel restrictions to consolidate power (Washington Post) The formal term in Arabic is mana’a al-safar, or “travel bans.” But the practical effect of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s policy of restricting journeys abroad by what appear to be thousands of Saudis is to intimidate those he regards as political threats. “This is hostage-taking as a tool of governing,” argued Khalid Aljabri, a Saudi cardiologist who lives in Toronto. Two of his younger siblings, Omar and Sarah, now both in their early 20s, were banned from travel in June 2017 shortly after MBS, as he’s known, became crown prince. MBS wanted leverage against their father, a former Saudi intelligence official named Saad Aljabri, hoping to force him home to face corruption allegations that Khalid says are false. An investigation shows that this practice of restricting foreign travel is much broader than generally recognized and is part of a larger system of organized repression in the kingdom. MBS has used these tools to consolidate power as he moves toward what some U.S. officials believe may be an attempt, perhaps this year, to seize the full powers of government from his ailing father, King Salman. The total number of Saudis who are subject to travel restrictions, according to Saudi and U.S. analysts, probably runs into the thousands. Those who are banned don’t usually know about their status until they go to the airport or try to cross a border post, where they’re stopped and told that exit is forbidden on order of the state security organization, which operates through the royal court. No formal, written explanation is typically given.

Zimbabwe on the brink (Foreign Policy) Three female opposition activists in Zimbabwe have been forced to remain in prison following a bail hearing on Monday as they face charges of fabricating allegations of being abducted, tortured, and humiliated by police. The charges against the women are widely thought to be politically motivated, while the U.N. called on the authorities to “urgently prosecute and punish the perpetrators of this outrageous crime.” The case against the women, one of whom, Joana Mamombe, is a member of Parliament, comes at a tense time in the country as inflation has risen to 785 percent. The price of bread and sugar has surged by 30 percent over the past week, evoking memories of the hyperinflation seen in 2008 that rendered the country’s currency worthless. Economic crisis and rising public anger have led to mounting speculation that a coup could be in the works. The national security council of Zimbabwe dismissed the rumors in a press conference last week, saying they were being fueled by allies of the late Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

[acsversace-news]

On the morning of July 15 1997, Gianni Versace was shot on the steps of his Miami mansion. The 50-year-old fashion designer was returning home with a selection of magazines bought from his local news café on Ocean Drive when he was twice hit in the head. Rushed to hospital with a faint pulse, his injuries proved too severe. At 9.20am, he was declared dead.

It sparked an international media sensation, a nationwide search for a killer – and one of the largest failed FBI manhunts of all time.

Two decades on, the shooting is the starting point for the latest outing of American Crime Story, the critically acclaimed television series that launched in 2016 with the ten-parter, The People vs OJ Simpson.

Like most people, that brief summary of Versace’s murder was more or less all that I knew when I was approached by Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson, producers of American Crime Story, to write a mini-series about the events leading up to it.

They had responded to my novel Child 44, loosely based on the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, and my scripts for the BBC drama, London Spy. But the original idea for The Assassination of Gianni Versace had come from Ryan Murphy, the king of American television and creator of hit shows including Nip/Tuck and Glee.

I was sent a copy of Vulgar Favors, Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth’s book chronicling the months and years preceding the Versace murder. It was remarkable not least because it showed how little I knew about the complexity and heartbreak of the story. I was a crime writer, a reader of true crime, and this was one of America’s biggest murder investigations of all time – so why had it passed me by?

My first impulse as a scriptwriter when starting on a new project is to try and read everything written on the subject. In some cases, that is impossible; there’s simply too much. In this instance, it was with surprise and some dismay that I discovered how little material there was, both about the crime itself, but also about Versace as a man.

In terms of public profile, it was the very opposite to the OJ Simpson case. With that trial, most people knew its various twists and turns, the names of the lawyers, even actual lines of courtroom dialogue. With Versace, I didn’t even know there had been four other murders leading up to his. I didn’t know the names of these victims, nor their stories. What, if anything, connected them to Versace?

Far from being asked to dramatise a famous moment of history, the challenge felt closer to being asked to solve an untold mystery.

And so it was that, three years ago, I heard the name Andrew Cunanan for the first time, the young man with an IQ of 147, once full of promise and potential, who was ultimately responsible for five savage murders. ​Did he know Versace? It seems that they’d met in San Francisco four years before the murder. But what had happened between them?

When I asked Orth what had drawn her to the case in the first place, she answered that she’d seen a photograph of Cunanan, a handsome young man, wearing black tie, and it struck her that he seemed such an unlikely killer. This is the question at the centre of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: not who did it – there’s no doubt about that – but why he did.

Many killers display disturbing patterns of behaviour that go back many years. They’re violent, abusive, cruel to animals. Arson is a repeating indicator for a troubled psychology. If you had told Cunanan or his friends that, at the age of 18, he was going to be a notorious and despised killer, they would have found the idea impossible to believe.

Cunanan was a gentle boy with a high-pitch voice, mocked for being gay, an effete Oscar Wilde-like figure at his school, who used his wit to deflect the homophobic taunts he regularly received. His father, Modesto, had been born in the Philippines, joined the US Navy, earned US citizenship, came to America to live the immigrant dream of success, joining Merrill Lynch and using his handsome salary to send Andrew to one of the finest schools in the country: Bishop’s in La Jolla, San Diego.

Cunanan read widely, delighted in art and literature. He liked to laugh; even more, he liked to make other people laugh. He recited Robin William’s monologues to his friends and family. He wanted to impress people. He wanted to be happy. He wanted to be loved.

The series we set out to make was never going to be simply the life story of Versace, though we contrast his success with Cunanan’s failures.

But Versace’s was a vibrant success story, about the particular nature of an individual’s brilliance, not a crime story; those are about the nature of society – in this case, the destruction wrought on so many by homophobia. How do you survive in a society where many consider your existence to be a crime?

The Assassination of Gianni Versace was my first experience of dramatising real events. Yet there wasn’t an inordinate amount of detail to go on. There had been no murder trial, there were gaps in understanding the timeline of the killer, and the police investigations were never held up to much scrutiny.

We were trying to build a picture of events from a series of fragments, all that remained from the wreckage of lives destroyed by Cunanan.

So what was the connection between his five victims, who were killed during a three-month period in 1997: an aspiring young architect in Minneapolis, a former US Navy sailor, a Chicago real estate tycoon, a devoted national parks employee and a globally renowned fashion icon?

Cunanan had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for more than a month before the designer’s death, and was believed to be on the loose in the Miami Beach area. Why was the local community not warned? Why did it take his suicide, eight days after he shot Versace, to put an end to the killings?  

By dramatising the Versace story, my hope was that while I might make mistakes in the detail – for example, conflating characters for clarity, or giving characters lines of dialogue when we have no transcripts to guide us – such inventions would service the central themes and a larger truth. I raise this because The Assassination of Gianni Versace has come in for criticism from several quarters, in particular our decision to portray Versace (played by Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez) as having been HIV-positive.

Though his status was never made public in his lifetime, nor confirmed after his death, the suggestion that he was positive is prominent in Orth’s book, the primary resource for the show; to erase mention of it felt like removing part of the period’s history.

In many ways, the Aids crisis offers a parallel to Cunanan’s killings: gay men had been left to die while the world looked the other way, and it was only once a celebrity died that the world took action.

Part of what inspired me about Versace, in contrast to what appalled me about Cunanan (played by Glee star Darren Criss), was how one man overcame the obstacles in his life, while the other was consumed by hatred; how one man created while the other man destroyed. Andrew Cunanan was not a serial killer – he was a terrorist, a man filled with loathing for other people’s success. He saw himself as a victim of this world.

To that end, his journey is a road movie through American society.

[orbemnews]

Top homicide detective says Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd was 'totally unnecessary' Lt. Richard Zimmerman, head of the homicide division for more than 12 years, testified Friday that Derek Chauvin’s actions violated policy by pressing his weight down on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while the man was handcuffed and in a prone position. Police are not trained to kneel on a person’s neck, he said. “Once the person is cuffed, the threat level goes down all the way,” the lieutenant told jurors at Chauvin’s murder trial. “How can that person hurt you?” he asked, adding that “you getting injured is way down.” Keeping the person handcuffed and in a prone position “restricts their breathing,” he said. Asked by prosecutor Matthew Frank if he was ever trained to kneel on a person, Zimmerman said no. “Because if your knee is on someone’s neck — that could kill them,” the lieutenant said. Chauvin at that point raised his head at the defense table and shot a look at Zimmerman. The potentially devastating testimony by the department’s most senior officer came on the abbreviated fifth day of testimony in the closely-watched trial. Judge Peter Cahill sent jurors home early because the trial was ahead of schedule. Testimony resumes Monday. Zimmerman said Chauvin’s actions were “uncalled for” and “totally unnecessary.” “You need to get them off their chest,” the veteran investigator said at one point. “If you’re lying on your chest, that’s constricting your breathing even more.” Zimmerman was a signatory to an open letter last year in which Minneapolis officers condemned Chauvin. Under cross-examination, Zimmerman agreed that an unconscious person can become combative when revived, kicking and thrashing around. Defense lawyer Eric Nelson sought to show that policing has changed significantly since Zimmerman got his training. He tried to draw attention to Zimmerman’s limited use of force experience as an investigator compared to a patrol officer. While not trained to use a knee on the neck of a suspect, Zimmerman told Nelson that officers in a fight for their life are allowed to use whatever force is reasonable and necessary. Sergeant describes arriving at scene of ‘possible critical incident’ Earlier, jurors heard testimony from the sergeant who secured the area shortly after Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. Sgt. Jon Edwards, a 14-year police veteran, said he arrived at the scene of a “possible critical incident” a little after 9:30 p.m. and had other officers canvass the area for potential witnesses. At the scene, Edwards said, he asked two officers — J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane — to activate their body-worn cameras. Both officers were later charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. Zimmerman arrived at the Chicago Avenue scene shortly before 10 p.m. Kueng and Lane were taken to City Hall as part of a critical incident investigation, according to Edwards. On Thursday, jurors heard Chauvin’s perspective in the minutes after Floyd’s limp body was taken away in an ambulance. It was the second time they heard his take on the events of that day. A clip from Chauvin’s body camera, viewed by jurors on Wednesday, showed Chauvin defending his actions to a bystander. Then, a call to Sgt. David Pleoger, his supervisor at the time, was captured on body camera footage and played during Pleoger’s testimony on Thursday. Chauvin made the call shortly after kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes on May 25 to explain his version of what happened. “I was just going to call and have you come out to our scene here,” Chauvin told Pleoger. “We just had to hold a guy down. He was going crazy. He wouldn’t … he wouldn’t go in the back of the squad — “ The video ends but in the rest of the call, Chauvin said Floyd had a medical emergency after struggling with officers trying to put him into a car, according to Pleoger. Chauvin did not mention holding his knee down on Floyd’s neck and back, Pleoger said. Pleoger drove to the scene and asked officers to speak to witnesses. “We can try, but they’re all pretty hostile,” Chauvin responded. Later that night, at the Hennepin County Medical Center, Chauvin told his supervisor that he had knelt on Floyd’s neck, Pleoger told the jury. The clip from Chauvin’s body camera played for the jury on Wednesday also showed him defending his actions to a bystander who called him out for his treatment of Floyd. “That’s one person’s opinion,” Chauvin responded as he got into his squad car. “We had to control this guy because he’s a sizable guy. It looks like he’s probably on something.” His version of the encounter is contradicted by videos showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd, who was handcuffed after he had passed out. Prosecutors said he knelt on Floyd for 3 minutes and 51 seconds during which Floyd was non-responsive. Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The defendant, in a suit and tie, has sat at the defense table, taking notes on a large legal pad. Earlier Thursday, Floyd’s girlfriend spoke about Floyd’s struggles with opioid addiction, and a pair of first responders testified that Floyd appeared dead when they arrived. Supervisor says Chauvin’s use of force should have ended earlier Pleoger’s testimony centered on police protocols for the use of force. Officers can use force in certain circumstances, but that force should stop once the person is under control. Pleoger testified that his review of bodycam footage showed Chauvin’s use of force should have ended earlier. “When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended the restraint,” he said. “It would be reasonable to put a knee on someone’s neck until they were not resisting anymore, but it should stop when they are no longer combative.” He said officers are required to call an ambulance and provide emergency aid while waiting for the ambulance. Restrained persons should be put on their side to help their breathing. Pleoger, on cross-examination, said he had not conducted a formal use of force review because the death investigation moved up the chain of command. ‘I thought he was dead’ A pair of Hennepin County paramedics said Floyd was unresponsive, not breathing and had no pulse when they arrived on the scene. “In layman terms, I thought he was dead,” paramedic Derek Smith said. Smith and his partner Seth Bravinder were first called to the scene as a non-emergency Code 2 for a mouth injury. A minute and a half later, the call was upgraded to a Code 3 — meaning the ambulance uses lights and sirens. Floyd did not appear to be breathing or moving. Smith checked Floyd’s pulse and pupils while Chauvin kept his knee on him. The paramedic said he believed his heart had stopped. Bravinder motioned for Chauvin to lift his knee off Floyd to get him on a stretcher and in the ambulance. Bravinder said they were concerned about the crowd of bystanders. An officer climbed into the ambulance and helped with chest compressions. Smith removed Floyd’s handcuffs, he testified. Bravinder stopped the ambulance at one point to assist in Floyd’s treatment, he testified. In the ambulance, however, Floyd had flatlined — meaning his heart showed no activity. Attempts to restart his heart with chest compressions, establishing an airway and electric shock failed. They dropped him off at the hospital. Fire Department Capt. Jeremy Norton testified that no one ever found a pulse in Floyd’s body. He later reported the incident to superiors in the Fire Department because it involved the death of someone in police custody and an off-duty firefighter was a witness. Floyd and girlfriend struggled with opioid addiction Courteney Ross, 45, told the jury she met Floyd in August 2017. He worked as a security guard at the Salvation Army. Floyd worked out every day and never complained of shortness of breath, she said. He was a mama’s boy who was a “shell of himself” after his mother’s death in 2018. They both struggled with addiction to opioids, she testified. They were prescribed opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain, which ultimately led to an addiction and their use of street drugs, she testified. In March 2020, she found Floyd doubled over in pain and took him to the emergency room, she testified. He had overdosed, she said. Ross said she believed he had started using again in May 2020. In opening statements, prosecutors acknowledged Floyd’s history of opioid addiction but said it was irrelevant to his death last May. But Nelson argued that Floyd’s true cause of death was drug use and several preexisting health issues. CNN’s Eric Levenson contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Chauvin #Derek #DerekChauvintrial:TophomicidedetectivesayskneelingonGeorgeFloydwas'totallyunnecessary'-CNN #detective #Floyd #George #homicide #kneeling #Top #totally #unnecessary #us

[wilsoninjury]

If you have lost a loved one in an accident, due to the fault of another party, negligence, or carelessness. You have the right to pursue wrongful death litigation against the person or party responsible. So, discuss your legal rights call Minnesota Wrongful Death Attorneys at Robert Wilson & Associates today by calling 612-334-3444.

[dipulb3]

Top homicide detective says Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd was 'totally unnecessary'

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/top-homicide-detective-says-derek-chauvin-kneeling-on-george-floyd-was-totally-unnecessary/

Top homicide detective says Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd was 'totally unnecessary'

Lt. Richard Zimmerman, head of the homicide division for more than 12 years, testified Friday that Derek Chauvin’s actions violated policy by pressing his weight down on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while the man was handcuffed and in a prone position. Police are not trained to kneel on a person’s neck, he said.

“Once the person is cuffed, the threat level goes down all the way,” the lieutenant told jurors at Chauvin’s murder trial.

“How can that person hurt you?” he asked, adding that “you getting injured is way down.” Keeping the person handcuffed and in a prone position “restricts their breathing,” he said.

Asked by prosecutor Matthew Frank if he was ever trained to kneel on a person, Zimmerman said no.

“Because if your knee is on someone’s neck — that could kill them,” the lieutenant said.

Chauvin at that point raised his head at the defense table and shot a look at Zimmerman.

The potentially devastating testimony by the department’s most senior officer came on the abbreviated fifth day of testimony in the closely-watched trial. Judge Peter Cahill sent jurors home early because the trial was ahead of schedule. Testimony resumes Monday.

Zimmerman said Chauvin’s actions were “uncalled for” and “totally unnecessary.”

“You need to get them off their chest,” the veteran investigator said at one point. “If you’re lying on your chest, that’s constricting your breathing even more.”

Zimmerman was a signatory to an open letter last year in which Minneapolis officers condemned Chauvin.

Under cross-examination, Zimmerman agreed that an unconscious person can become combative when revived, kicking and thrashing around.

Defense lawyer Eric Nelson sought to show that policing has changed significantly since Zimmerman got his training. He tried to draw attention to Zimmerman’s limited use of force experience as an investigator compared to a patrol officer.

While not trained to use a knee on the neck of a suspect, Zimmerman told Nelson that officers in a fight for their life are allowed to use whatever force is reasonable and necessary.

Sergeant describes arriving at scene of ‘possible critical incident’

Earlier, jurors heard testimony from the sergeant who secured the area shortly after Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

Sgt. Jon Edwards, a 14-year police veteran, said he arrived at the scene of a “possible critical incident” a little after 9:30 p.m. and had other officers canvass the area for potential witnesses.

At the scene, Edwards said, he asked two officers — J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane — to activate their body-worn cameras. Both officers were later charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.

Zimmerman arrived at the Chicago Avenue scene shortly before 10 p.m. Kueng and Lane were taken to City Hall as part of a critical incident investigation, according to Edwards.

On Thursday, jurors heard Chauvin’s perspective in the minutes after Floyd’s limp body was taken away in an ambulance. It was the second time they heard his take on the events of that day. A clip from Chauvin’s body camera, viewed by jurors on Wednesday, showed Chauvin defending his actions to a bystander.

Then, a call to Sgt. David Pleoger, his supervisor at the time, was captured on body camera footage and played during Pleoger’s testimony on Thursday. Chauvin made the call shortly after kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes on May 25 to explain his version of what happened.

“I was just going to call and have you come out to our scene here,” Chauvin told Pleoger. “We just had to hold a guy down. He was going crazy. He wouldn’t … he wouldn’t go in the back of the squad — “

The video ends but in the rest of the call, Chauvin said Floyd had a medical emergency after struggling with officers trying to put him into a car, according to Pleoger. Chauvin did not mention holding his knee down on Floyd’s neck and back, Pleoger said.

Pleoger drove to the scene and asked officers to speak to witnesses. “We can try, but they’re all pretty hostile,” Chauvin responded.

Later that night, at the Hennepin County Medical Center, Chauvin told his supervisor that he had knelt on Floyd’s neck, Pleoger told the jury.

The clip from Chauvin’s body camera played for the jury on Wednesday also showed him defending his actions to a bystander who called him out for his treatment of Floyd.

“That’s one person’s opinion,” Chauvin responded as he got into his squad car. “We had to control this guy because he’s a sizable guy. It looks like he’s probably on something.”

His version of the encounter is contradicted by videos showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd, who was handcuffed after he had passed out. Prosecutors said he knelt on Floyd for 3 minutes and 51 seconds during which Floyd was non-responsive.

Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The defendant, in a suit and tie, has sat at the defense table, taking notes on a large legal pad.

Earlier Thursday, Floyd’s girlfriend spoke about Floyd’s struggles with opioid addiction, and a pair of first responders testified that Floyd appeared dead when they arrived.

Supervisor says Chauvin’s use of force should have ended earlier

Pleoger’s testimony centered on police protocols for the use of force. Officers can use force in certain circumstances, but that force should stop once the person is under control.

Pleoger testified that his review of bodycam footage showed Chauvin’s use of force should have ended earlier.

“When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended the restraint,” he said. “It would be reasonable to put a knee on someone’s neck until they were not resisting anymore, but it should stop when they are no longer combative.”

He said officers are required to call an ambulance and provide emergency aid while waiting for the ambulance. Restrained persons should be put on their side to help their breathing.

Pleoger, on cross-examination, said he had not conducted a formal use of force review because the death investigation moved up the chain of command.

‘I thought he was dead’

A pair of Hennepin County paramedics said Floyd was unresponsive, not breathing and had no pulse when they arrived on the scene.

“In layman terms, I thought he was dead,” paramedic Derek Smith said.

Smith and his partner Seth Bravinder were first called to the scene as a non-emergency Code 2 for a mouth injury. A minute and a half later, the call was upgraded to a Code 3 — meaning the ambulance uses lights and sirens.

Floyd did not appear to be breathing or moving. Smith checked Floyd’s pulse and pupils while Chauvin kept his knee on him. The paramedic said he believed his heart had stopped. Bravinder motioned for Chauvin to lift his knee off Floyd to get him on a stretcher and in the ambulance.

Bravinder said they were concerned about the crowd of bystanders.

An officer climbed into the ambulance and helped with chest compressions. Smith removed Floyd’s handcuffs, he testified. Bravinder stopped the ambulance at one point to assist in Floyd’s treatment, he testified.

In the ambulance, however, Floyd had flatlined — meaning his heart showed no activity. Attempts to restart his heart with chest compressions, establishing an airway and electric shock failed. They dropped him off at the hospital.

Fire Department Capt. Jeremy Norton testified that no one ever found a pulse in Floyd’s body. He later reported the incident to superiors in the Fire Department because it involved the death of someone in police custody and an off-duty firefighter was a witness.

Floyd and girlfriend struggled with opioid addiction

Courteney Ross, 45, told the jury she met Floyd in August 2017. He worked as a security guard at the Salvation Army.

Floyd worked out every day and never complained of shortness of breath, she said. He was a mama’s boy who was a “shell of himself” after his mother’s death in 2018.

They both struggled with addiction to opioids, she testified. They were prescribed opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain, which ultimately led to an addiction and their use of street drugs, she testified.

In March 2020, she found Floyd doubled over in pain and took him to the emergency room, she testified. He had overdosed, she said. Ross said she believed he had started using again in May 2020.

In opening statements, prosecutors acknowledged Floyd’s history of opioid addiction but said it was irrelevant to his death last May. But Nelson argued that Floyd’s true cause of death was drug use and several preexisting health issues.

Appradab’s Eric Levenson contributed to this report.

[surly01]

Brutal Cops, Brutal Country

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on June 7, 2020

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

My family tree is replete with police and firemen. My great uncle was a cop. My cousins are cops. Likewise my wife's family is full of police and firemen. I suspect it's that way for most\ people; police work is so ubiquitous that most working class families have cops dangling somewhere from the family tree. So I bring to a discussion of police and police work no agenda other than that of a taxpayer, a citizen, and a pasty white man comfortable enough to be concerned for social justice, at least before cocktail time.

So it's with sadness that I beheld the events of the week and conclude that police departments in this country need a giant enema. What happened to George Floyd was bad enough; what happened to an 75-year man in Buffalo is quite another.

(The victim was later identified as Martin Gugino, a long-time peace activist.) The ubiquity of video cameras on phones, such as that which documented the Buffalo incident, would make you think police might have some concern for better PR. These videos go viral and make it around the world while the excuses from the Police Union are putting on their pants. John Evans, the president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, said,

In response to the suspensions of the two most egregious offenders, 57 members of Buffalo police riot response team resigned en masse. Not a good look.

We've also seen images of white journalists being shot with rubber bullets and beaten with truncheons, and innocent white protesters manhandled by warrior cops. What black Americans have been living with for many decades, becomes newsworthy only when it happens to white people. Better late than never. The fact that police are responding to protests about police violence with even greater violence indicates an innate brutality, an imperfect strategy, and the failure to remember who they ultimately work for. In particular, who is paying the bills.

No one minimizes that police work is hard. Imagine living with the prospect that the next routine traffic stop can explode in gunplay. Imagine daily contact with drunks, the mentally disabled and violent criminals. Cops confront life-and-death situations on a regular basis. Yet if media and police unions repeat the line that "police work is dangerous," it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do police develop an anticipatory mindset of violence when they believe that they are going into deadly battle when they head out on patrol?

Is there no training?

Yet none of that should excuse away the snarling brutality exhibited by cops against unarmed, otherwise peaceful protesters. Ever since we were able to wink at the Eighth Amendment's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment to justify torture (rebranded as "enhanced interrogation" ), we have forgotten who we were and what we once stood for.

As I noted last week, police are the occupation army of capital. Their job is to protect property and wealth. Regardless of what you think, the Supreme Court has held that police are under no obligation whatsoever to "protect and serve"  you. Occupation armies quite justifiably view a subject citizenry as hostile. We learn, for example, that the vast majority of city police in Minneapolis live in the suburbs. This is common among most city workers. But it means cops do not view the people they are patrolling as neighbors. Imagine the change in outcomes if they did.

Consider the following headlines from US papers just this past week:

Buffalo cops expected to face charges for shoving elderly protester

June 6, 2020 | 10:33am  The officers are anticipated in court Saturday, according to sources cited by a local NBC affiliate. Their colleagues from the department’s Emergency Response Team are expected to escort them inside…

Riot police clear protesters with tear gas for Trump’s church photo op, drawing outrage

JUN 02, 2020|12:39 AM  Riot police in Washington, D.C., used tear gas to clear protesters from a park near the White House as President Trump vowed to crack down on the demonstrations. Around 6:30 p.m., a half hour before the city’s 7 p.m. curfew, police used tear gas, rubber bullets, shields and horses to force protesters out of Lafayette Park…

Protests about police brutality are met with wave of police brutality across US

June 6, 2020  Use teargas, batons, pepper spray, fists, feet and vehicles against protesters sparks lawsuits and international condemnation

Buffalo mayor blasts elderly protester shoved by cops

June 6, 2020 | 8:25am  The elderly Buffalo protester knocked to the ground by cops in a viral video that has become an international symbol of police brutality was an “agitator” who was “trying to…

75-year-old Buffalo man pushed by cops described as 'gentle person'

June 5, 2020 | 5:52pm Martin Gugino — the 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground by Buffalo police in a video seen by millions — is a long-time peace activist and “gentle person,”…

Entire police team resigns in solidarity with cops who shoved elderly man

June 5, 2020 | 3:56pm The entire Buffalo police Emergency Response Team has resigned following the suspension of two officers who were caught on video shoving a 75-year-old protester to the pavement, according to reports…

Black Tacoma man who died in police custody screamed 'I can't breathe': lawyer

June 6, 2020 | 9:20am  A 33-year-old black man who died in police custody in Tacoma, Washington, screamed “I can’t breathe” on dispatcher audio, a lawyer for the man’s family said. Marcus Ellis was apprehended…

Breonna Taylor remembered by NYC mourners on what would be her 27th birthday

June 5, 2020 | 10:42pm  Anti-police brutality protesters in New York City paid their respects on Friday to Breonna Taylor, a black EMT who was fatally shot by cops in her home in Kentucky home…

Minneapolis bans police chokeholds in wake of George Floyd death

June 5, 2020 | 1:41pm  Negotiators for the city of Minneapolis have agreed with the state to ban the use of chokeholds by police and to require police to report and intervene anytime they see…

DC mayor has 'Black Lives Matter' painted on street leading to White House

June 5, 2020 | 1:40pm  Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday had “Black Lives Matter” painted in large yellow letters on the street that leads to the White House, and also designated the square…

Kansas City announces police reform amid George Floyd protests

June 5, 2020 | 3:43am  KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City is reforming police procedures after criticism from black organizations about police conduct during nearly a week of protests as well as long-standing tension between…

Minneapolis City Council members pledge to 'dismantle' police department

June 4, 2020 | 11:31pm   Members of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to “dismantle” the city’s police department in the wake of worldwide protests over the killing of George Floyd. Council President Lisa Bender joined…

NYPD officers appear to beat passing cyclist with batons: video

June 4, 2020 | 9:50am  Three NYPD officers were caught on video apparently beating a cyclist with their batons. One of the officers is seen whacking the cyclist as he peddles across an intersection, with…

City Council secures veto-proof majority for bill criminalizing police chokeholds

June 4, 2020 | 1:39am  The City Council has secured a veto-proof majority for legislation to criminalize NYPD chokeholds, Speaker Corey Johnson said Wednesday. With 35 Council members supporting the bill, it can become law over…

Protesters take a knee at Trump Hotel and Trump Tower ahead of NYC curfew

June 2, 2020 | 8:39pm  A mass of anti-police brutality protesters gathered in front of Trump International Hotel ahead of Tuesday’s 8 p.m. curfew, as demonstrations continued to rage across the city for a sixth…

George Floyd's 6-year-old daughter appears next to weeping mom

June 2, 2020 | 7:08pm  George Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter stood next to her weeping mom at a press conference Tuesday as the woman recalled how Floyd moved to Minnesota to help support them — and…

Six Atlanta cops charged in excessive force arrest of two students

June 2, 2020 | 3:06pm  Body camera footage shows the officers breaking the windows of a car and yanking the students, Taniyah Pilgrim, 20, and Messiah Young, 22, out Saturday night as they were riding…

Cop suspended for shoving kneeling George Floyd protester

June 2, 2020 | 1:09pm  A Fort Lauderdale cop has been suspended after he was caught on video shoving a kneeling protester during a George Floyd demonstration Sunday, according to a report.

The Police Are Targeting Protest Medics

June 5– As people take to the streets to protest racism and police violence against Black Americans after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd last week ― it doesn’t matter who you are or why you’re there: The cops will take you out.

Police targeting journalists during protests is an assault on the First Amendment

June 4- It’s not unusual for politicians and candidates for office to express their fervent and unwavering support for the Second Amendment. Now would be an ideal time for them to show the same allegiance to the First Amendment and its guarantee of a free press.

Neighbors usually don't do these things to neighbors. One wonders how much of the brutality we see comes from the infiltration of law enforcement agencies by white supremacists, members of the alt right and neofascists. These groups maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies.

We saw in Charlottesville how state police and others stood aside while armed Klansmen and Nazis ran amok, resulting in injuries to antifascist protests and the death of one woman, Heather Heyer, run over by a Nazi from Ohio. (This was the episode that led to Trump's infamous refusal to disavow Nazis, proclaiming that there were "good people on both sides.")

"When the looting starts, the shooting starts."

–Miami police Chief Walter Headley, 1968, tweeted by Trump May 29

Trump's effusions of "treat 'em rough," and "Dominance!" all contribute to an atmosphere that lends itself to brutality. Law-enforcement officers know that they no longer have Obama and Holder looking over their shoulders; Now it's Trump and Barr, and they are free to indulge their darkest impulses. As recently as five years ago, the police were afraid of being filmed, having their images captured, with the potential to be identified. No more. Now it seems having brutality captured on video is a badge of honor. Virality, bitchez…

Little surprise that if cops know that state-sanctioned violence is permissible, state-sanctioned violence is what we'll get. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery was a clear a case of vigilantism as we are likely to see. The only thing missing were the robes and hoods.

American authoritarianism is going to be rooted in racist violence. The Compromise of 1877, which ended a tie vote in the Electoral College and Rutherford Hayes becoming President, was conditioned upon the withdrawal of Federal troops from the south. This ended Reconstruction, as well as the vision for a unified country. It also reinvigorated the KKK, and birthed Jim Crow.

Racism received a booster shot when Woodrow Wilson screened "Birth of a Nation" at the White House in 1915. The D.W. Griffith film glorified the Klan and told a false story about race relations in the South, with the aim "to revolutionize Northern audiences that would transform every man into a Southern partisan for life." "Birth of a Nation" built upon the existing myth of The Lost Causepromulgated by Confederate propagandist E.A. Pollard, a fictional re-writing of history that endorsed the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the Civil War as a struggle primarily to save the Southern way of life, or to defend "states' rights", in the face of overwhelming "Northern aggression." Ignoring the abject treason of the slavers.

Racist policing has a long and ignoble pedigree, and now it has been given new life by the most openly racist president since Wilson.

The First Amendment is visibly under assault. Dozens of reports from around the country this week have shown journalists getting shot at, manhandled, abused and arrested by police officers, even after identifying themselves as journalists. We saw a CNN journalist arrested live on national TV while filing a report. Coming soon, a further assault on freedom of assembly, complete with truncheons wielded upon peaceful, defenseless protesters.

This is the sort of behavior we are used to seeing from Egypt, Brazil, Kenya or Paraguay, not the US. But the non-lethal techniques we've tested abroad have come home. And are paid for with our tax dollars.

We've seen an increasingly weak and desperate president label antifa as a "terrorist group" as he ramps up the tough-guy rhetoric. All in service to a sort of illusory "patriotism," which is simply rabid nationalism in drag. Trump wraps himself in the flag, and raises a bible as a worship object. Flag worship raises armies, after all. And military veterans often muster out and join the police.

Next time we will review why it is so difficult to prosecute cops– the concept of "qualified immunity," which some are trying to end. And how we might effect change: Cut the rot at the root, go after the funding, And watch the weed wither and die. As always, follow the money.

Surly1 was an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary. Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone.

[stephenmccull]

Less-Lethal Weapons Blind, Maim and Kill. Victims Say Enough Is Enough.

There’s a gap in Scott Olsen’s memory for the night of Oct. 25, 2011.

The Iraq War vet remembers leaving his tech job in the San Francisco Bay Area and taking a BART train to join an Occupy Oakland protest against economic and social inequality.

He remembers standing near protesters who faced off with Oakland police officers bristling with riot gear.

He remembers being carried away by other protesters.

But not the moment when a “bean bag” round fired from an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury that forced him to relearn how to talk.

What happened to Olsen was not unique or isolated. Time and again over the past two decades ― from L.A. to D.C., Minneapolis to Miami ― peace officers have targeted civilian demonstrators with munitions designed to stun and stop, rather than kill. As many as 60 protesters suffered head wounds during recent Black Lives Matter events, including bone fractures, blindness and traumatic brain injuries.

For years, activists and civil libertarians worldwide have urged police to ban less-lethal projectiles from use for crowd control. The United Kingdom ceased using them that way decades ago.

MRIs from 2011 (left) and 2013 show the initial and then permanent damage Scott Olsen incurred after an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury.(Scans courtesy of Scott Olsen)

But an investigation by USA Today and KHN found little has changed over the years in the United States.

Beyond the Constitution and federal court rulings that require police use of force to be “reasonable,” there are no national rules for discharging bean bags and rubber bullets. Nor are there standards for the weapons’ velocity, accuracy or safety. Congress and state legislatures have done little to offer solutions.

While locations and demonstration types vary, a pattern has emerged: Shooting victims file lawsuits, cities pay out millions of dollars, police departments try to adopt reforms. And, a few years later, it happens again. Law enforcement officers, typically with limited training, are bound only by departmental policies that vary from one agency to the next.

Sometimes referred to as kinetic impact projectiles, less-lethal ammunition includes bean bags (nylon sacks filled with lead shot), so-called rubber bullets that actually are tipped with foam or sponge and paintball-like rounds containing chemical irritants. Velocity and range vary greatly, but they can travel upwards of 200 mph. The rounds were developed to save lives by giving police a knock-down option that can disable threats from a safe distance without killing the target.

But, over decades of use, munitions that originally were touted as safe and nonlethal have proven otherwise:

In 2000, a protester at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles lost an eye. Seven years later in the same city, scores of migrant-rights demonstrators were wounded amid a fusillade of less-lethal rounds.

In 2001, when rioting broke out in Tucson after the University of Arizona lost the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, a student lost an eye to a bean bag.

In 2003, 58 people were injured in Oakland when officers launched a barrage of wooden pellets and other devices during anti-Iraq War protests. To settle court claims, the city adopted new crowd control policies. Eight years later, Olsen was struck down.

In 2004, in Boston, a college student celebrating a Red Sox victory was killed by a projectile filled with pepper-based irritant when it tore through her eye and into her brain.

Brandon Saenz lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas this June.(Courtesy of Brandon Saenz’s lawyer, Daryl Washington)

The past two months have been especially telling, with dozens maimed or hurt amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations: Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a bean bag round in La Mesa, California. And, in Portland, Oregon, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella suffered facial and skull fractures when he was shot by a federal officer with a less-lethal round.

“Nothing has changed,” said attorney Elizabeth Ritter, 59, one of several people shot in the head by an impact munition at a 2003 protest in Miami. A video later surfaced showing police supervisors laughing about her shooting. “It’s fairly sickening to me. We have a systemic, deeply ingrained problem.”

‘We’re Just in a Circle’

From a law enforcement perspective, less-lethal weapons are essential tools in a continuum of force. A sponge-tipped round or a pouch full of pellets can stop a violent act without putting the officer in peril — and without killing the suspect.

Police leaders typically condemn the indiscriminate firing into peaceful crowds but characterize such incidents as conduct violations rather than weaponry problems.

Steve Ijames, a retired officer who developed programs for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, blames “boneheaded policemen” and a training gap for the misuse of arms. Law enforcement instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use less-lethal force against individual suspects, Ijames noted, and not on crowd-control scenarios that occur only sporadically.

Still, when demonstrations morph into disturbances, less-lethal devices are often dusted off and pressed into duty.

“What is the alternative?” asked Sid Heal, a retired commander from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We’re stuck with the tools we have. And if you take one away, we’re going to have to go to something else, and it will probably be harsher.”

The National Institute of Justice spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on initiatives to collect data and start developing national standards for less-lethal weapon safety after the Boston student’s death in 2004. Funding dried up after a few years, and the efforts died.

Against that backdrop, Congress has shown little interest in regulating bean bags and rubber bullets. And national law enforcement leadership groups have repeatedly punted when given an opportunity.

After the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2014, 2015 and 2017 would have banned state and local law enforcement from using key federal grant dollars for less-lethal weapons. The measure never made it out of committee.

In 2017, a coalition of law enforcement groups representing police leaders and unions, which gathered to study use of force, published a consensus policy and discussion paper. The groups advocated a ban on police use of martial arts weapons — but did not extend it to less-lethal munitions.

A White House task force established after the Ferguson protests recommended “annual training” but little more for less-lethal weapons.

In June, 13 U.S. Senate Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the alleged misuses of rubber bullets and bean bags against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“Although intended to only cause minimal harm, such weapons may cause significant injury,” the senators wrote. “Better information is needed to identify deficiencies in the training and use of these less-lethal weapons.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation of federal officers’ response to protest activity in Portland and Washington, D.C., the watchdog announced Thursday. Leaders of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight committees this month had asked the office to review federal officers’ “violent tactics” used against protesters in those cities and elsewhere.

And, in California, several Democratic legislators introduced a measure in June that would ban the police use of less-lethal munitions to disperse demonstrators. Except in riot conditions, the proposed law says, kinetic energy projectiles “shall not be used by any law enforcement agency against an assembly protected by the First Amendment.”

Charles Mesloh, a former police officer, a certified instructor and a longtime researcher on less-lethal weapons, said the status quo is “unacceptable,” but he sees little chance that national standards will be imposed for training, weapon safety and use.

“I’ve been doing this long enough, I just — we’re just in a circle,” said Mesloh. “We’ll have some lip service … and there’ll be some mandated training, and then we’ll just go right back to where we were.”

Los Angeles: Searching for a Less-Lethal Alternative

On her desk, Carol Sobel keeps a photo showing her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.(Courtesy of Carol Sobel)

Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, keeps an unusual photo on her desk. It shows her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.

That’s the impact of a police projectile that struck her between the eyes as she stood outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a mainly peaceful crowd.

“My head snapped back and it hurt,” she said. “It was inconceivable to me that someone would shoot me in the face.”

Over the past two decades, Los Angeles police have repeatedly used less-lethal firepower on demonstrators, injuring hundreds and generating lawsuits that Sobel helped prosecute.

Los Angeles police turned to bean bags as an alternative to live ammo after 1992 rioting triggered by the acquittal of officers who beat a Black man named Rodney King. As violence swept the city, police at first hunkered down, doing little to maintain order, then launched an aggressive crackdown. Ten people were killed by officers.

In the aftermath, the department was criticized simultaneously for brutality and for failure to defend the community. Bean bag rounds and later 40mm projectiles emerged as options that were supposed to allow officers to protect themselves and the city without deaths or lawsuits.

With the new arsenal, police in 2000 descended on protesters at MacArthur Park during the convention. Witnesses said demonstrators were shot in the back with rubber bullets as they tried to disperse. The city approved $4.1 million in payments to more than 90 people hurt during the melee.

Among the shooting victims was Melissa Schneider, who secured a $1.4 million settlement after being blinded in one eye. Two decades later, Schneider said she still wakes up with excruciating pain where the eye used to be and frequently vomits as a result of migraines.

Schneider said she was shaken watching internet videos of protesters injured in recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations: “I immediately started sobbing — not for me, but for them and the journey they had ahead,” she said. “Things need to change. And it’s really sad. It’s been 20 years, and this is still happening.”

Seven years after Schneider was maimed, Los Angeles police were back in MacArthur Park using batons, horses and less-lethal rounds during an immigrant-rights protest. More than 250 people were injured. An internal review determined projectiles were launched into crowds and at peaceful protesters. Although such weapons are supposed to be used to stop lawbreakers, no demonstrator was arrested.

This time, city taxpayers forked out $13 million to settle civil complaints. The Police Department agreed to four years of court supervision, with rules banning the use of less-lethal rounds against peaceful protesters.

By 2015, amid a national controversy over police killings, Los Angeles police leaders were touting less-lethal weapons as part of a kinder, gentler approach. The agency in 2017 adopted a progressive policy requiring officers to try de-escalation tactics before opening fire.

But in May, when protests erupted after the death of George Floyd, police in Los Angeles unleashed bean bags and sponge rounds. A lawsuit filed by Black Lives Matter alleges “that the training of the LAPD in the use of these potentially lethal weapons was absent, seriously deficient, or intentionally indifferent to the known serious harm that can result.” The complaint, with Sobel as lead attorney, seeks an emergency ban on the use of less-lethal arms for crowd control.

Lawyers for the city argued a blanket ban would hamstring efforts to maintain law and order.

Los Angeles police leaders declined to be interviewed for this article because it deals with personnel matters and issues that “will eventually be fleshed out in a complete, independent after-action report.”

Sobel said she’s seen it all before: “There is absolutely no institutional memory in the LAPD. That’s No. 1. And No. 2 — they don’t care.”

Boston: ‘Everything Just Kind of Went Away’

Victoria Snelgrove leaned against a railing of a parking garage at Fenway Park, waiting for the crowd to dissipate so she could drive home from a raucous Red Sox celebration. Then Boston police fired the projectile that tore through her eye and into her brain.

The home team had just defeated the New York Yankees to win the 2004 American League Championship. Sox fans rejoiced in the streets around the stadium. After some set fires and threw bottles, police began launching projectiles.

Snelgrove, a 21-year-old college student and sports enthusiast who aspired to be an entertainment reporter on television, slipped into a coma. Her parents made the excruciating decision to remove life support hours later.

The family collected $5 million in damages — reportedly the city’s largest settlement in history at the time. Snelgrove’s death spurred Boston police to convene a panel to figure out what went wrong.

Colleagues, friends and teachers of Victoria Snelgrove gather at Emerson College on the first anniversary of her death.(David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Among the commission’s findings: Boston had acquired its launchers less than a year earlier, without an adequate understanding of safety issues. The manufacturer had suggested rounds would not break the skin.

But a second protester had a projectile lodged in his forehead, and a third suffered a gaping wound to the cheek.

The commission said police needed more training on how to use less-lethal weapons, particularly in crowd-control situations. It called for the National Institute of Justice to collect and disseminate comprehensive information on a burgeoning array of less-lethal projectiles. And it urged the federal government to develop minimum safety standards with a testing program overseen by an independent agency such as the institute.

Those recommendations were championed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said, “The growing use and the false sense that they are completely safe are leading to the kind of avoidable tragedy that shocked all of us in Boston.”

NIJ awarded grants to a Wayne State University researcher, Cynthia Bir, to help develop standards. Over several years, study groups were formed. Testing modes were developed.

Then, according to Bir, Tasers and other equipment became more widely used by police. As interest in rubber bullets and bean bags waned, the Great Recession depleted funding. Research efforts dissolved along with prospects for standards for less-lethal weapons.

“NIJ gave us a fair amount of funding to look at this issue and then … the focus switched to Tasers,” Bir said. “Everything just kind of went away.”

The NIJ did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.

Rick Wyant, a forensic scientist who served on an NIJ panel, said standards could be imposed by tying them to federal law enforcement grants. Otherwise, unregulated arms can continue putting the public at risk, he said.

“I can go in my garage and develop something, and if I get a [police] chief to sign off on it and deploy it, that’s all that needs to happen,” Wyant said.

‘Policing Has to Have a Reckoning’

U.S. law enforcement and defense agencies spend about $2.5 billion annually on less-lethal weapons and ammunition, according to Anuj Mishra, an analyst with MarketsandMarkets, a research firm based in India. That’s almost half the global total and includes sales of tear gas and Tasers as well as projectile weapons.

Mishra said less-lethal weapons sales have taken off with a proliferation of new products. More than a half-dozen companies supply U.S. police departments with plastic and rubber bullets, paintball-type rounds, launchers and less-lethal projectiles fired from 12-gauge shotguns.

Sales are driven by personal relationships, internet advertising and trade shows where police try out the latest models on shooting ranges, industry executives say.

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology,” said Eugene Paoline, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “They like toys.”

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology. They like toys.”

Less-lethal weapons became part of a national conversation after the deadly 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. As police agencies responded to protests with military-style tactics, criticism mounted from medical, civil rights and activist groups that condemn the use of less-lethal projectiles to break up demonstrations.

Physicians for Human Rights, for example, contends that kinetic-impact bullets “are not an appropriate weapon to be used for crowd management and specifically for dispersal purposes.”

Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored research in 2017 with Physicians for Human Rights on the damage inflicted by less-lethal rounds. A study of nearly 2,000 shooting victims found that 3% died and 15% were permanently disabled.

Haar’s takeaway: “Policing has to have a reckoning,” and that would include a ban on rubber bullets and more regulation of all less-lethal weapons in crowd-control scenarios.

By contrast, police and government inquiries after the Ferguson protests resulted in no clear guidelines for the use of plastic and bean bag rounds. A task force created by President Obama, which urged federal investigations of inappropriate use of police equipment and tactics during demonstrations, recommended little more than “annual training.”

Eleven of the nation’s top law enforcement leadership organizations in 2017 developed what they called a “National Consensus Policy on Use of Force.” The white paper lacks detailed direction for less-lethal munitions while stressing that even vague guidance is “not intended to be a national standard by which all agencies are held accountable.”

In the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations, that report was updated this month. But wording on less-lethal weaponry remained the same: It urges police to ban martial arts weapons such as blackjacks and nunchucks, but avoids a recommendation on less-lethal projectiles, leaving decisions to individual agencies.

Terrence Cunningham, who took part in the review as president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said after inquiries for this story that he now supports a consensus policy for less-lethal munitions. “We definitely need some kind of foundational standards,” said Cunningham, now the association’s deputy executive director.

Meanwhile, the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank, last year convened 225 police chiefs, officers, industry representatives and academics for yet another symposium on police use of force. The forum’s 45-page report endorses less-lethal arms as a sometimes controversial part of the law enforcement toolkit and emphasizes that the weapons “often do not work as desired.”

‘Bad Optics’ and ‘Unfunded Mandates’

Law enforcement experts point out there are about 18,000 police forces in the United States, and it may be impossible to develop homogeneous standards or practices that work in communities ranging from New York City to Minooka, Illinois.

“Most agencies in America are 50 people or less. They don’t have big budgets,” said Don Kester, head of training for the National Tactical Officer Association. “You write a [detailed] policy and all the chiefs say you’ve created an unfunded mandate” for equipment and training.

The alternative — and the reality — is a system in which each agency decides which weapons to use, what training to provide and what policies to enforce.

All operate on the same underlying function, as spelled out by Ed Obayashi, an attorney and deputy chief of California’s Plumas County Sheriff’s Office: “to inflict pain to gain compliance and to disperse a crowd.” If protesters ignore police instructions, he added, firing on the overall crowd could be justified depending on circumstances.

Obayashi allowed that videos taken during recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations presented “bad optics” for less-lethal weapons. But a full story can’t be presented from films, he said while asserting that the overall response by U.S. peace officers was “very controlled and did not cause a measurable number of serious injuries.”

“When law enforcement gives an order to disperse, and that doesn’t happen, we don’t have a lot of options,” agreed Wade Carpenter, the police chief in Park City, Utah, who oversees IACP’s firearms and tactical committees. “Whenever we have individuals that are trying to incite these riots, there is a level of force that has to be used.”

Oakland: ‘A Series of Cascading Events’

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview.

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

Olsen now tends bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

The projectile that struck Olsen’s head in 2011 was launched despite previous, similar incidents that resulted in lawsuits, independent investigations, court orders and police reforms.

James Chanin, an Oakland attorney who filed some of the civil actions, and won settlements, tells about a “long history of alleged civil rights violations” by the city’s police force.

In April 2003, protesters against the Iraq War blocked a Port of Oakland entrance at a marine terminal. A lawsuit described how police moved to break up the demonstration, firing wooden dowels to skip them off the ground at protesters, shooting bean bag rounds into the crowd, and setting off stinger grenades that scattered chemical irritants and small balls.

Sri Louise Coles, a lead plaintiff in one of the cases, alleged in a lawsuit that she suffered face and neck wounds from a projectile and additional injuries when an officer rammed her with a motorcycle.

In settling that case, Oakland agreed to new crowd-control and management policies. Less-lethal munitions “shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal,” the policy instructed, and such devices “may never be used indiscriminately against a crowd or group of persons.”

Eight years later, Olsen was near the front of an Occupy Oakland demonstration when police declared the gathering an illegal assembly and ordered the crowd to disperse.

Officers then launched a fusillade of less-lethal munitions, including the round that struck Olsen.

As other protesters rushed to his aid, an Oakland police officer deployed a chemical canister into the group, an independent investigation later found.

Police said afterward they did not see Olsen had been wounded, so they did not fulfill a mandatory requirement to render medical aid and immediately start a formal investigation of the shooting. The independent investigation commissioned by the city called the Police Department’s account “unsettling and not believable.”

The review also said the decision to use less-lethal munitions “may or may not have been reasonable” based on the Police Department’s existing policy at the time. “We recommend that further research should be conducted to identify and evaluate other munitions that are less prone to cause injuries, but are still effective as crowd control devices,” the reviewers concluded.

The review compared the city’s crowd-control effort to an aviation disaster caused not by a single mistake but by “a series of cascading events.” In Oakland’s case, the tragedy stemmed in part from years of “diminishing resources” and “increasing workload.”

The city ultimately agreed to a $4.5 million settlement with Olsen.

Once again, Oakland revised policies and training. For several years, Chanin said, the cycle of protests, shootings and lawsuits seemed to stop.

Then George Floyd demonstrations broke out, and so did the less-lethal weapons. According to a federal complaint filed in June by the Anti Police-Terror Project, Oakland officers indiscriminately launched projectiles, flash-bangs and tear gas into crowds and at individuals.

Attorneys for both sides in the case stipulated to an agreement that forbids Oakland police from using less-lethal weapons against demonstrators.

For Olsen, now tending bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm, the memory with a hole came flooding back.

“We passed these regulations and policies to control the use of less-lethal weapons,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see other people’s lives affected as mine was. … Police have shown they do not care about these kinds of controls, so the next step is to take those weapons away from them.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, Hannah Norman and Liz Szabo of KHN contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Less-Lethal Weapons Blind, Maim and Kill. Victims Say Enough Is Enough. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Less-Lethal Weapons Blind, Maim and Kill. Victims Say Enough Is Enough.

There’s a gap in Scott Olsen’s memory for the night of Oct. 25, 2011.

The Iraq War vet remembers leaving his tech job in the San Francisco Bay Area and taking a BART train to join an Occupy Oakland protest against economic and social inequality.

He remembers standing near protesters who faced off with Oakland police officers bristling with riot gear.

He remembers being carried away by other protesters.

But not the moment when a “bean bag” round fired from an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury that forced him to relearn how to talk.

What happened to Olsen was not unique or isolated. Time and again over the past two decades ― from L.A. to D.C., Minneapolis to Miami ― peace officers have targeted civilian demonstrators with munitions designed to stun and stop, rather than kill. As many as 60 protesters suffered head wounds during recent Black Lives Matter events, including bone fractures, blindness and traumatic brain injuries.

For years, activists and civil libertarians worldwide have urged police to ban less-lethal projectiles from use for crowd control. The United Kingdom ceased using them that way decades ago.

MRIs from 2011 (left) and 2013 show the initial and then permanent damage Scott Olsen incurred after an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury.(Scans courtesy of Scott Olsen)

But an investigation by USA Today and KHN found little has changed over the years in the United States.

Beyond the Constitution and federal court rulings that require police use of force to be “reasonable,” there are no national rules for discharging bean bags and rubber bullets. Nor are there standards for the weapons’ velocity, accuracy or safety. Congress and state legislatures have done little to offer solutions.

While locations and demonstration types vary, a pattern has emerged: Shooting victims file lawsuits, cities pay out millions of dollars, police departments try to adopt reforms. And, a few years later, it happens again. Law enforcement officers, typically with limited training, are bound only by departmental policies that vary from one agency to the next.

Sometimes referred to as kinetic impact projectiles, less-lethal ammunition includes bean bags (nylon sacks filled with lead shot), so-called rubber bullets that actually are tipped with foam or sponge and paintball-like rounds containing chemical irritants. Velocity and range vary greatly, but they can travel upwards of 200 mph. The rounds were developed to save lives by giving police a knock-down option that can disable threats from a safe distance without killing the target.

But, over decades of use, munitions that originally were touted as safe and nonlethal have proven otherwise:

In 2000, a protester at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles lost an eye. Seven years later in the same city, scores of migrant-rights demonstrators were wounded amid a fusillade of less-lethal rounds.

In 2001, when rioting broke out in Tucson after the University of Arizona lost the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, a student lost an eye to a bean bag.

In 2003, 58 people were injured in Oakland when officers launched a barrage of wooden pellets and other devices during anti-Iraq War protests. To settle court claims, the city adopted new crowd control policies. Eight years later, Olsen was struck down.

In 2004, in Boston, a college student celebrating a Red Sox victory was killed by a projectile filled with pepper-based irritant when it tore through her eye and into her brain.

Brandon Saenz lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas this June.(Courtesy of Brandon Saenz’s lawyer, Daryl Washington)

The past two months have been especially telling, with dozens maimed or hurt amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations: Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a bean bag round in La Mesa, California. And, in Portland, Oregon, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella suffered facial and skull fractures when he was shot by a federal officer with a less-lethal round.

“Nothing has changed,” said attorney Elizabeth Ritter, 59, one of several people shot in the head by an impact munition at a 2003 protest in Miami. A video later surfaced showing police supervisors laughing about her shooting. “It’s fairly sickening to me. We have a systemic, deeply ingrained problem.”

‘We’re Just in a Circle’

From a law enforcement perspective, less-lethal weapons are essential tools in a continuum of force. A sponge-tipped round or a pouch full of pellets can stop a violent act without putting the officer in peril — and without killing the suspect.

Police leaders typically condemn the indiscriminate firing into peaceful crowds but characterize such incidents as conduct violations rather than weaponry problems.

Steve Ijames, a retired officer who developed programs for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, blames “boneheaded policemen” and a training gap for the misuse of arms. Law enforcement instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use less-lethal force against individual suspects, Ijames noted, and not on crowd-control scenarios that occur only sporadically.

Still, when demonstrations morph into disturbances, less-lethal devices are often dusted off and pressed into duty.

“What is the alternative?” asked Sid Heal, a retired commander from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We’re stuck with the tools we have. And if you take one away, we’re going to have to go to something else, and it will probably be harsher.”

The National Institute of Justice spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on initiatives to collect data and start developing national standards for less-lethal weapon safety after the Boston student’s death in 2004. Funding dried up after a few years, and the efforts died.

Against that backdrop, Congress has shown little interest in regulating bean bags and rubber bullets. And national law enforcement leadership groups have repeatedly punted when given an opportunity.

After the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2014, 2015 and 2017 would have banned state and local law enforcement from using key federal grant dollars for less-lethal weapons. The measure never made it out of committee.

In 2017, a coalition of law enforcement groups representing police leaders and unions, which gathered to study use of force, published a consensus policy and discussion paper. The groups advocated a ban on police use of martial arts weapons — but did not extend it to less-lethal munitions.

A White House task force established after the Ferguson protests recommended “annual training” but little more for less-lethal weapons.

In June, 13 U.S. Senate Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the alleged misuses of rubber bullets and bean bags against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“Although intended to only cause minimal harm, such weapons may cause significant injury,” the senators wrote. “Better information is needed to identify deficiencies in the training and use of these less-lethal weapons.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation of federal officers’ response to protest activity in Portland and Washington, D.C., the watchdog announced Thursday. Leaders of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight committees this month had asked the office to review federal officers’ “violent tactics” used against protesters in those cities and elsewhere.

And, in California, several Democratic legislators introduced a measure in June that would ban the police use of less-lethal munitions to disperse demonstrators. Except in riot conditions, the proposed law says, kinetic energy projectiles “shall not be used by any law enforcement agency against an assembly protected by the First Amendment.”

Charles Mesloh, a former police officer, a certified instructor and a longtime researcher on less-lethal weapons, said the status quo is “unacceptable,” but he sees little chance that national standards will be imposed for training, weapon safety and use.

“I’ve been doing this long enough, I just — we’re just in a circle,” said Mesloh. “We’ll have some lip service … and there’ll be some mandated training, and then we’ll just go right back to where we were.”

Los Angeles: Searching for a Less-Lethal Alternative

On her desk, Carol Sobel keeps a photo showing her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.(Courtesy of Carol Sobel)

Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, keeps an unusual photo on her desk. It shows her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.

That’s the impact of a police projectile that struck her between the eyes as she stood outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a mainly peaceful crowd.

“My head snapped back and it hurt,” she said. “It was inconceivable to me that someone would shoot me in the face.”

Over the past two decades, Los Angeles police have repeatedly used less-lethal firepower on demonstrators, injuring hundreds and generating lawsuits that Sobel helped prosecute.

Los Angeles police turned to bean bags as an alternative to live ammo after 1992 rioting triggered by the acquittal of officers who beat a Black man named Rodney King. As violence swept the city, police at first hunkered down, doing little to maintain order, then launched an aggressive crackdown. Ten people were killed by officers.

In the aftermath, the department was criticized simultaneously for brutality and for failure to defend the community. Bean bag rounds and later 40mm projectiles emerged as options that were supposed to allow officers to protect themselves and the city without deaths or lawsuits.

With the new arsenal, police in 2000 descended on protesters at MacArthur Park during the convention. Witnesses said demonstrators were shot in the back with rubber bullets as they tried to disperse. The city approved $4.1 million in payments to more than 90 people hurt during the melee.

Among the shooting victims was Melissa Schneider, who secured a $1.4 million settlement after being blinded in one eye. Two decades later, Schneider said she still wakes up with excruciating pain where the eye used to be and frequently vomits as a result of migraines.

Schneider said she was shaken watching internet videos of protesters injured in recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations: “I immediately started sobbing — not for me, but for them and the journey they had ahead,” she said. “Things need to change. And it’s really sad. It’s been 20 years, and this is still happening.”

Seven years after Schneider was maimed, Los Angeles police were back in MacArthur Park using batons, horses and less-lethal rounds during an immigrant-rights protest. More than 250 people were injured. An internal review determined projectiles were launched into crowds and at peaceful protesters. Although such weapons are supposed to be used to stop lawbreakers, no demonstrator was arrested.

This time, city taxpayers forked out $13 million to settle civil complaints. The Police Department agreed to four years of court supervision, with rules banning the use of less-lethal rounds against peaceful protesters.

By 2015, amid a national controversy over police killings, Los Angeles police leaders were touting less-lethal weapons as part of a kinder, gentler approach. The agency in 2017 adopted a progressive policy requiring officers to try de-escalation tactics before opening fire.

But in May, when protests erupted after the death of George Floyd, police in Los Angeles unleashed bean bags and sponge rounds. A lawsuit filed by Black Lives Matter alleges “that the training of the LAPD in the use of these potentially lethal weapons was absent, seriously deficient, or intentionally indifferent to the known serious harm that can result.” The complaint, with Sobel as lead attorney, seeks an emergency ban on the use of less-lethal arms for crowd control.

Lawyers for the city argued a blanket ban would hamstring efforts to maintain law and order.

Los Angeles police leaders declined to be interviewed for this article because it deals with personnel matters and issues that “will eventually be fleshed out in a complete, independent after-action report.”

Sobel said she’s seen it all before: “There is absolutely no institutional memory in the LAPD. That’s No. 1. And No. 2 — they don’t care.”

Boston: ‘Everything Just Kind of Went Away’

Victoria Snelgrove leaned against a railing of a parking garage at Fenway Park, waiting for the crowd to dissipate so she could drive home from a raucous Red Sox celebration. Then Boston police fired the projectile that tore through her eye and into her brain.

The home team had just defeated the New York Yankees to win the 2004 American League Championship. Sox fans rejoiced in the streets around the stadium. After some set fires and threw bottles, police began launching projectiles.

Snelgrove, a 21-year-old college student and sports enthusiast who aspired to be an entertainment reporter on television, slipped into a coma. Her parents made the excruciating decision to remove life support hours later.

The family collected $5 million in damages — reportedly the city’s largest settlement in history at the time. Snelgrove’s death spurred Boston police to convene a panel to figure out what went wrong.

Colleagues, friends and teachers of Victoria Snelgrove gather at Emerson College on the first anniversary of her death.(David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Among the commission’s findings: Boston had acquired its launchers less than a year earlier, without an adequate understanding of safety issues. The manufacturer had suggested rounds would not break the skin.

But a second protester had a projectile lodged in his forehead, and a third suffered a gaping wound to the cheek.

The commission said police needed more training on how to use less-lethal weapons, particularly in crowd-control situations. It called for the National Institute of Justice to collect and disseminate comprehensive information on a burgeoning array of less-lethal projectiles. And it urged the federal government to develop minimum safety standards with a testing program overseen by an independent agency such as the institute.

Those recommendations were championed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said, “The growing use and the false sense that they are completely safe are leading to the kind of avoidable tragedy that shocked all of us in Boston.”

NIJ awarded grants to a Wayne State University researcher, Cynthia Bir, to help develop standards. Over several years, study groups were formed. Testing modes were developed.

Then, according to Bir, Tasers and other equipment became more widely used by police. As interest in rubber bullets and bean bags waned, the Great Recession depleted funding. Research efforts dissolved along with prospects for standards for less-lethal weapons.

“NIJ gave us a fair amount of funding to look at this issue and then … the focus switched to Tasers,” Bir said. “Everything just kind of went away.”

The NIJ did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.

Rick Wyant, a forensic scientist who served on an NIJ panel, said standards could be imposed by tying them to federal law enforcement grants. Otherwise, unregulated arms can continue putting the public at risk, he said.

“I can go in my garage and develop something, and if I get a [police] chief to sign off on it and deploy it, that’s all that needs to happen,” Wyant said.

‘Policing Has to Have a Reckoning’

U.S. law enforcement and defense agencies spend about $2.5 billion annually on less-lethal weapons and ammunition, according to Anuj Mishra, an analyst with MarketsandMarkets, a research firm based in India. That’s almost half the global total and includes sales of tear gas and Tasers as well as projectile weapons.

Mishra said less-lethal weapons sales have taken off with a proliferation of new products. More than a half-dozen companies supply U.S. police departments with plastic and rubber bullets, paintball-type rounds, launchers and less-lethal projectiles fired from 12-gauge shotguns.

Sales are driven by personal relationships, internet advertising and trade shows where police try out the latest models on shooting ranges, industry executives say.

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology,” said Eugene Paoline, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “They like toys.”

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology. They like toys.”

Less-lethal weapons became part of a national conversation after the deadly 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. As police agencies responded to protests with military-style tactics, criticism mounted from medical, civil rights and activist groups that condemn the use of less-lethal projectiles to break up demonstrations.

Physicians for Human Rights, for example, contends that kinetic-impact bullets “are not an appropriate weapon to be used for crowd management and specifically for dispersal purposes.”

Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored research in 2017 with Physicians for Human Rights on the damage inflicted by less-lethal rounds. A study of nearly 2,000 shooting victims found that 3% died and 15% were permanently disabled.

Haar’s takeaway: “Policing has to have a reckoning,” and that would include a ban on rubber bullets and more regulation of all less-lethal weapons in crowd-control scenarios.

By contrast, police and government inquiries after the Ferguson protests resulted in no clear guidelines for the use of plastic and bean bag rounds. A task force created by President Obama, which urged federal investigations of inappropriate use of police equipment and tactics during demonstrations, recommended little more than “annual training.”

Eleven of the nation’s top law enforcement leadership organizations in 2017 developed what they called a “National Consensus Policy on Use of Force.” The white paper lacks detailed direction for less-lethal munitions while stressing that even vague guidance is “not intended to be a national standard by which all agencies are held accountable.”

In the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations, that report was updated this month. But wording on less-lethal weaponry remained the same: It urges police to ban martial arts weapons such as blackjacks and nunchucks, but avoids a recommendation on less-lethal projectiles, leaving decisions to individual agencies.

Terrence Cunningham, who took part in the review as president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said after inquiries for this story that he now supports a consensus policy for less-lethal munitions. “We definitely need some kind of foundational standards,” said Cunningham, now the association’s deputy executive director.

Meanwhile, the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank, last year convened 225 police chiefs, officers, industry representatives and academics for yet another symposium on police use of force. The forum’s 45-page report endorses less-lethal arms as a sometimes controversial part of the law enforcement toolkit and emphasizes that the weapons “often do not work as desired.”

‘Bad Optics’ and ‘Unfunded Mandates’

Law enforcement experts point out there are about 18,000 police forces in the United States, and it may be impossible to develop homogeneous standards or practices that work in communities ranging from New York City to Minooka, Illinois.

“Most agencies in America are 50 people or less. They don’t have big budgets,” said Don Kester, head of training for the National Tactical Officer Association. “You write a [detailed] policy and all the chiefs say you’ve created an unfunded mandate” for equipment and training.

The alternative — and the reality — is a system in which each agency decides which weapons to use, what training to provide and what policies to enforce.

All operate on the same underlying function, as spelled out by Ed Obayashi, an attorney and deputy chief of California’s Plumas County Sheriff’s Office: “to inflict pain to gain compliance and to disperse a crowd.” If protesters ignore police instructions, he added, firing on the overall crowd could be justified depending on circumstances.

Obayashi allowed that videos taken during recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations presented “bad optics” for less-lethal weapons. But a full story can’t be presented from films, he said while asserting that the overall response by U.S. peace officers was “very controlled and did not cause a measurable number of serious injuries.”

“When law enforcement gives an order to disperse, and that doesn’t happen, we don’t have a lot of options,” agreed Wade Carpenter, the police chief in Park City, Utah, who oversees IACP’s firearms and tactical committees. “Whenever we have individuals that are trying to incite these riots, there is a level of force that has to be used.”

Oakland: ‘A Series of Cascading Events’

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview.

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

Olsen now tends bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

The projectile that struck Olsen’s head in 2011 was launched despite previous, similar incidents that resulted in lawsuits, independent investigations, court orders and police reforms.

James Chanin, an Oakland attorney who filed some of the civil actions, and won settlements, tells about a “long history of alleged civil rights violations” by the city’s police force.

In April 2003, protesters against the Iraq War blocked a Port of Oakland entrance at a marine terminal. A lawsuit described how police moved to break up the demonstration, firing wooden dowels to skip them off the ground at protesters, shooting bean bag rounds into the crowd, and setting off stinger grenades that scattered chemical irritants and small balls.

Sri Louise Coles, a lead plaintiff in one of the cases, alleged in a lawsuit that she suffered face and neck wounds from a projectile and additional injuries when an officer rammed her with a motorcycle.

In settling that case, Oakland agreed to new crowd-control and management policies. Less-lethal munitions “shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal,” the policy instructed, and such devices “may never be used indiscriminately against a crowd or group of persons.”

Eight years later, Olsen was near the front of an Occupy Oakland demonstration when police declared the gathering an illegal assembly and ordered the crowd to disperse.

Officers then launched a fusillade of less-lethal munitions, including the round that struck Olsen.

As other protesters rushed to his aid, an Oakland police officer deployed a chemical canister into the group, an independent investigation later found.

Police said afterward they did not see Olsen had been wounded, so they did not fulfill a mandatory requirement to render medical aid and immediately start a formal investigation of the shooting. The independent investigation commissioned by the city called the Police Department’s account “unsettling and not believable.”

The review also said the decision to use less-lethal munitions “may or may not have been reasonable” based on the Police Department’s existing policy at the time. “We recommend that further research should be conducted to identify and evaluate other munitions that are less prone to cause injuries, but are still effective as crowd control devices,” the reviewers concluded.

The review compared the city’s crowd-control effort to an aviation disaster caused not by a single mistake but by “a series of cascading events.” In Oakland’s case, the tragedy stemmed in part from years of “diminishing resources” and “increasing workload.”

The city ultimately agreed to a $4.5 million settlement with Olsen.

Once again, Oakland revised policies and training. For several years, Chanin said, the cycle of protests, shootings and lawsuits seemed to stop.

Then George Floyd demonstrations broke out, and so did the less-lethal weapons. According to a federal complaint filed in June by the Anti Police-Terror Project, Oakland officers indiscriminately launched projectiles, flash-bangs and tear gas into crowds and at individuals.

Attorneys for both sides in the case stipulated to an agreement that forbids Oakland police from using less-lethal weapons against demonstrators.

For Olsen, now tending bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm, the memory with a hole came flooding back.

“We passed these regulations and policies to control the use of less-lethal weapons,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see other people’s lives affected as mine was. … Police have shown they do not care about these kinds of controls, so the next step is to take those weapons away from them.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, Hannah Norman and Liz Szabo of KHN contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Less-Lethal Weapons Blind, Maim and Kill. Victims Say Enough Is Enough. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Less-Lethal Weapons Blind, Maim and Kill. Victims Say Enough Is Enough.

There’s a gap in Scott Olsen’s memory for the night of Oct. 25, 2011.

The Iraq War vet remembers leaving his tech job in the San Francisco Bay Area and taking a BART train to join an Occupy Oakland protest against economic and social inequality.

He remembers standing near protesters who faced off with Oakland police officers bristling with riot gear.

He remembers being carried away by other protesters.

But not the moment when a “bean bag” round fired from an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury that forced him to relearn how to talk.

What happened to Olsen was not unique or isolated. Time and again over the past two decades ― from L.A. to D.C., Minneapolis to Miami ― peace officers have targeted civilian demonstrators with munitions designed to stun and stop, rather than kill. As many as 60 protesters suffered head wounds during recent Black Lives Matter events, including bone fractures, blindness and traumatic brain injuries.

For years, activists and civil libertarians worldwide have urged police to ban less-lethal projectiles from use for crowd control. The United Kingdom ceased using them that way decades ago.

MRIs from 2011 (left) and 2013 show the initial and then permanent damage Scott Olsen incurred after an officer’s 12-gauge shotgun crashed into the left side of his head, fracturing his skull and inflicting a near-fatal brain injury.(Scans courtesy of Scott Olsen)

But an investigation by USA Today and KHN found little has changed over the years in the United States.

Beyond the Constitution and federal court rulings that require police use of force to be “reasonable,” there are no national rules for discharging bean bags and rubber bullets. Nor are there standards for the weapons’ velocity, accuracy or safety. Congress and state legislatures have done little to offer solutions.

While locations and demonstration types vary, a pattern has emerged: Shooting victims file lawsuits, cities pay out millions of dollars, police departments try to adopt reforms. And, a few years later, it happens again. Law enforcement officers, typically with limited training, are bound only by departmental policies that vary from one agency to the next.

Sometimes referred to as kinetic impact projectiles, less-lethal ammunition includes bean bags (nylon sacks filled with lead shot), so-called rubber bullets that actually are tipped with foam or sponge and paintball-like rounds containing chemical irritants. Velocity and range vary greatly, but they can travel upwards of 200 mph. The rounds were developed to save lives by giving police a knock-down option that can disable threats from a safe distance without killing the target.

But, over decades of use, munitions that originally were touted as safe and nonlethal have proven otherwise:

In 2000, a protester at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles lost an eye. Seven years later in the same city, scores of migrant-rights demonstrators were wounded amid a fusillade of less-lethal rounds.

In 2001, when rioting broke out in Tucson after the University of Arizona lost the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, a student lost an eye to a bean bag.

In 2003, 58 people were injured in Oakland when officers launched a barrage of wooden pellets and other devices during anti-Iraq War protests. To settle court claims, the city adopted new crowd control policies. Eight years later, Olsen was struck down.

In 2004, in Boston, a college student celebrating a Red Sox victory was killed by a projectile filled with pepper-based irritant when it tore through her eye and into her brain.

Brandon Saenz lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas this June.(Courtesy of Brandon Saenz’s lawyer, Daryl Washington)

The past two months have been especially telling, with dozens maimed or hurt amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations: Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a bean bag round in La Mesa, California. And, in Portland, Oregon, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella suffered facial and skull fractures when he was shot by a federal officer with a less-lethal round.

“Nothing has changed,” said attorney Elizabeth Ritter, 59, one of several people shot in the head by an impact munition at a 2003 protest in Miami. A video later surfaced showing police supervisors laughing about her shooting. “It’s fairly sickening to me. We have a systemic, deeply ingrained problem.”

‘We’re Just in a Circle’

From a law enforcement perspective, less-lethal weapons are essential tools in a continuum of force. A sponge-tipped round or a pouch full of pellets can stop a violent act without putting the officer in peril — and without killing the suspect.

Police leaders typically condemn the indiscriminate firing into peaceful crowds but characterize such incidents as conduct violations rather than weaponry problems.

Steve Ijames, a retired officer who developed programs for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, blames “boneheaded policemen” and a training gap for the misuse of arms. Law enforcement instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use less-lethal force against individual suspects, Ijames noted, and not on crowd-control scenarios that occur only sporadically.

Still, when demonstrations morph into disturbances, less-lethal devices are often dusted off and pressed into duty.

“What is the alternative?” asked Sid Heal, a retired commander from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We’re stuck with the tools we have. And if you take one away, we’re going to have to go to something else, and it will probably be harsher.”

The National Institute of Justice spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on initiatives to collect data and start developing national standards for less-lethal weapon safety after the Boston student’s death in 2004. Funding dried up after a few years, and the efforts died.

Against that backdrop, Congress has shown little interest in regulating bean bags and rubber bullets. And national law enforcement leadership groups have repeatedly punted when given an opportunity.

After the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2014, 2015 and 2017 would have banned state and local law enforcement from using key federal grant dollars for less-lethal weapons. The measure never made it out of committee.

In 2017, a coalition of law enforcement groups representing police leaders and unions, which gathered to study use of force, published a consensus policy and discussion paper. The groups advocated a ban on police use of martial arts weapons — but did not extend it to less-lethal munitions.

A White House task force established after the Ferguson protests recommended “annual training” but little more for less-lethal weapons.

In June, 13 U.S. Senate Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the alleged misuses of rubber bullets and bean bags against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“Although intended to only cause minimal harm, such weapons may cause significant injury,” the senators wrote. “Better information is needed to identify deficiencies in the training and use of these less-lethal weapons.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation of federal officers’ response to protest activity in Portland and Washington, D.C., the watchdog announced Thursday. Leaders of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight committees this month had asked the office to review federal officers’ “violent tactics” used against protesters in those cities and elsewhere.

And, in California, several Democratic legislators introduced a measure in June that would ban the police use of less-lethal munitions to disperse demonstrators. Except in riot conditions, the proposed law says, kinetic energy projectiles “shall not be used by any law enforcement agency against an assembly protected by the First Amendment.”

Charles Mesloh, a former police officer, a certified instructor and a longtime researcher on less-lethal weapons, said the status quo is “unacceptable,” but he sees little chance that national standards will be imposed for training, weapon safety and use.

“I’ve been doing this long enough, I just — we’re just in a circle,” said Mesloh. “We’ll have some lip service … and there’ll be some mandated training, and then we’ll just go right back to where we were.”

Los Angeles: Searching for a Less-Lethal Alternative

On her desk, Carol Sobel keeps a photo showing her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.(Courtesy of Carol Sobel)

Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, keeps an unusual photo on her desk. It shows her with a goose-egg wound to her forehead and two black eyes. What’s not visible in the picture is the concussion, sinus fracture and more than six months of headaches.

That’s the impact of a police projectile that struck her between the eyes as she stood outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a mainly peaceful crowd.

“My head snapped back and it hurt,” she said. “It was inconceivable to me that someone would shoot me in the face.”

Over the past two decades, Los Angeles police have repeatedly used less-lethal firepower on demonstrators, injuring hundreds and generating lawsuits that Sobel helped prosecute.

Los Angeles police turned to bean bags as an alternative to live ammo after 1992 rioting triggered by the acquittal of officers who beat a Black man named Rodney King. As violence swept the city, police at first hunkered down, doing little to maintain order, then launched an aggressive crackdown. Ten people were killed by officers.

In the aftermath, the department was criticized simultaneously for brutality and for failure to defend the community. Bean bag rounds and later 40mm projectiles emerged as options that were supposed to allow officers to protect themselves and the city without deaths or lawsuits.

With the new arsenal, police in 2000 descended on protesters at MacArthur Park during the convention. Witnesses said demonstrators were shot in the back with rubber bullets as they tried to disperse. The city approved $4.1 million in payments to more than 90 people hurt during the melee.

Among the shooting victims was Melissa Schneider, who secured a $1.4 million settlement after being blinded in one eye. Two decades later, Schneider said she still wakes up with excruciating pain where the eye used to be and frequently vomits as a result of migraines.

Schneider said she was shaken watching internet videos of protesters injured in recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations: “I immediately started sobbing — not for me, but for them and the journey they had ahead,” she said. “Things need to change. And it’s really sad. It’s been 20 years, and this is still happening.”

Seven years after Schneider was maimed, Los Angeles police were back in MacArthur Park using batons, horses and less-lethal rounds during an immigrant-rights protest. More than 250 people were injured. An internal review determined projectiles were launched into crowds and at peaceful protesters. Although such weapons are supposed to be used to stop lawbreakers, no demonstrator was arrested.

This time, city taxpayers forked out $13 million to settle civil complaints. The Police Department agreed to four years of court supervision, with rules banning the use of less-lethal rounds against peaceful protesters.

By 2015, amid a national controversy over police killings, Los Angeles police leaders were touting less-lethal weapons as part of a kinder, gentler approach. The agency in 2017 adopted a progressive policy requiring officers to try de-escalation tactics before opening fire.

But in May, when protests erupted after the death of George Floyd, police in Los Angeles unleashed bean bags and sponge rounds. A lawsuit filed by Black Lives Matter alleges “that the training of the LAPD in the use of these potentially lethal weapons was absent, seriously deficient, or intentionally indifferent to the known serious harm that can result.” The complaint, with Sobel as lead attorney, seeks an emergency ban on the use of less-lethal arms for crowd control.

Lawyers for the city argued a blanket ban would hamstring efforts to maintain law and order.

Los Angeles police leaders declined to be interviewed for this article because it deals with personnel matters and issues that “will eventually be fleshed out in a complete, independent after-action report.”

Sobel said she’s seen it all before: “There is absolutely no institutional memory in the LAPD. That’s No. 1. And No. 2 — they don’t care.”

Boston: ‘Everything Just Kind of Went Away’

Victoria Snelgrove leaned against a railing of a parking garage at Fenway Park, waiting for the crowd to dissipate so she could drive home from a raucous Red Sox celebration. Then Boston police fired the projectile that tore through her eye and into her brain.

The home team had just defeated the New York Yankees to win the 2004 American League Championship. Sox fans rejoiced in the streets around the stadium. After some set fires and threw bottles, police began launching projectiles.

Snelgrove, a 21-year-old college student and sports enthusiast who aspired to be an entertainment reporter on television, slipped into a coma. Her parents made the excruciating decision to remove life support hours later.

The family collected $5 million in damages — reportedly the city’s largest settlement in history at the time. Snelgrove’s death spurred Boston police to convene a panel to figure out what went wrong.

Colleagues, friends and teachers of Victoria Snelgrove gather at Emerson College on the first anniversary of her death.(David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Among the commission’s findings: Boston had acquired its launchers less than a year earlier, without an adequate understanding of safety issues. The manufacturer had suggested rounds would not break the skin.

But a second protester had a projectile lodged in his forehead, and a third suffered a gaping wound to the cheek.

The commission said police needed more training on how to use less-lethal weapons, particularly in crowd-control situations. It called for the National Institute of Justice to collect and disseminate comprehensive information on a burgeoning array of less-lethal projectiles. And it urged the federal government to develop minimum safety standards with a testing program overseen by an independent agency such as the institute.

Those recommendations were championed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said, “The growing use and the false sense that they are completely safe are leading to the kind of avoidable tragedy that shocked all of us in Boston.”

NIJ awarded grants to a Wayne State University researcher, Cynthia Bir, to help develop standards. Over several years, study groups were formed. Testing modes were developed.

Then, according to Bir, Tasers and other equipment became more widely used by police. As interest in rubber bullets and bean bags waned, the Great Recession depleted funding. Research efforts dissolved along with prospects for standards for less-lethal weapons.

“NIJ gave us a fair amount of funding to look at this issue and then … the focus switched to Tasers,” Bir said. “Everything just kind of went away.”

The NIJ did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.

Rick Wyant, a forensic scientist who served on an NIJ panel, said standards could be imposed by tying them to federal law enforcement grants. Otherwise, unregulated arms can continue putting the public at risk, he said.

“I can go in my garage and develop something, and if I get a [police] chief to sign off on it and deploy it, that’s all that needs to happen,” Wyant said.

‘Policing Has to Have a Reckoning’

U.S. law enforcement and defense agencies spend about $2.5 billion annually on less-lethal weapons and ammunition, according to Anuj Mishra, an analyst with MarketsandMarkets, a research firm based in India. That’s almost half the global total and includes sales of tear gas and Tasers as well as projectile weapons.

Mishra said less-lethal weapons sales have taken off with a proliferation of new products. More than a half-dozen companies supply U.S. police departments with plastic and rubber bullets, paintball-type rounds, launchers and less-lethal projectiles fired from 12-gauge shotguns.

Sales are driven by personal relationships, internet advertising and trade shows where police try out the latest models on shooting ranges, industry executives say.

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology,” said Eugene Paoline, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “They like toys.”

“Cops are always looking for gadgets. They’re always looking for new technology. They like toys.”

Less-lethal weapons became part of a national conversation after the deadly 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. As police agencies responded to protests with military-style tactics, criticism mounted from medical, civil rights and activist groups that condemn the use of less-lethal projectiles to break up demonstrations.

Physicians for Human Rights, for example, contends that kinetic-impact bullets “are not an appropriate weapon to be used for crowd management and specifically for dispersal purposes.”

Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician and researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored research in 2017 with Physicians for Human Rights on the damage inflicted by less-lethal rounds. A study of nearly 2,000 shooting victims found that 3% died and 15% were permanently disabled.

Haar’s takeaway: “Policing has to have a reckoning,” and that would include a ban on rubber bullets and more regulation of all less-lethal weapons in crowd-control scenarios.

By contrast, police and government inquiries after the Ferguson protests resulted in no clear guidelines for the use of plastic and bean bag rounds. A task force created by President Obama, which urged federal investigations of inappropriate use of police equipment and tactics during demonstrations, recommended little more than “annual training.”

Eleven of the nation’s top law enforcement leadership organizations in 2017 developed what they called a “National Consensus Policy on Use of Force.” The white paper lacks detailed direction for less-lethal munitions while stressing that even vague guidance is “not intended to be a national standard by which all agencies are held accountable.”

In the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations, that report was updated this month. But wording on less-lethal weaponry remained the same: It urges police to ban martial arts weapons such as blackjacks and nunchucks, but avoids a recommendation on less-lethal projectiles, leaving decisions to individual agencies.

Terrence Cunningham, who took part in the review as president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said after inquiries for this story that he now supports a consensus policy for less-lethal munitions. “We definitely need some kind of foundational standards,” said Cunningham, now the association’s deputy executive director.

Meanwhile, the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank, last year convened 225 police chiefs, officers, industry representatives and academics for yet another symposium on police use of force. The forum’s 45-page report endorses less-lethal arms as a sometimes controversial part of the law enforcement toolkit and emphasizes that the weapons “often do not work as desired.”

‘Bad Optics’ and ‘Unfunded Mandates’

Law enforcement experts point out there are about 18,000 police forces in the United States, and it may be impossible to develop homogeneous standards or practices that work in communities ranging from New York City to Minooka, Illinois.

“Most agencies in America are 50 people or less. They don’t have big budgets,” said Don Kester, head of training for the National Tactical Officer Association. “You write a [detailed] policy and all the chiefs say you’ve created an unfunded mandate” for equipment and training.

The alternative — and the reality — is a system in which each agency decides which weapons to use, what training to provide and what policies to enforce.

All operate on the same underlying function, as spelled out by Ed Obayashi, an attorney and deputy chief of California’s Plumas County Sheriff’s Office: “to inflict pain to gain compliance and to disperse a crowd.” If protesters ignore police instructions, he added, firing on the overall crowd could be justified depending on circumstances.

Obayashi allowed that videos taken during recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations presented “bad optics” for less-lethal weapons. But a full story can’t be presented from films, he said while asserting that the overall response by U.S. peace officers was “very controlled and did not cause a measurable number of serious injuries.”

“When law enforcement gives an order to disperse, and that doesn’t happen, we don’t have a lot of options,” agreed Wade Carpenter, the police chief in Park City, Utah, who oversees IACP’s firearms and tactical committees. “Whenever we have individuals that are trying to incite these riots, there is a level of force that has to be used.”

Oakland: ‘A Series of Cascading Events’

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview.

If Scott Olsen struggles to recall what happened when police shot him with a bean bag round, his sentiments about the Oakland Police Department are crystal clear: “I think bad things,” Olsen, now 33, said during a recent phone interview. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

Olsen now tends bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm. (Judy Griesedieck for USA TODAY)

The projectile that struck Olsen’s head in 2011 was launched despite previous, similar incidents that resulted in lawsuits, independent investigations, court orders and police reforms.

James Chanin, an Oakland attorney who filed some of the civil actions, and won settlements, tells about a “long history of alleged civil rights violations” by the city’s police force.

In April 2003, protesters against the Iraq War blocked a Port of Oakland entrance at a marine terminal. A lawsuit described how police moved to break up the demonstration, firing wooden dowels to skip them off the ground at protesters, shooting bean bag rounds into the crowd, and setting off stinger grenades that scattered chemical irritants and small balls.

Sri Louise Coles, a lead plaintiff in one of the cases, alleged in a lawsuit that she suffered face and neck wounds from a projectile and additional injuries when an officer rammed her with a motorcycle.

In settling that case, Oakland agreed to new crowd-control and management policies. Less-lethal munitions “shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal,” the policy instructed, and such devices “may never be used indiscriminately against a crowd or group of persons.”

Eight years later, Olsen was near the front of an Occupy Oakland demonstration when police declared the gathering an illegal assembly and ordered the crowd to disperse.

Officers then launched a fusillade of less-lethal munitions, including the round that struck Olsen.

As other protesters rushed to his aid, an Oakland police officer deployed a chemical canister into the group, an independent investigation later found.

Police said afterward they did not see Olsen had been wounded, so they did not fulfill a mandatory requirement to render medical aid and immediately start a formal investigation of the shooting. The independent investigation commissioned by the city called the Police Department’s account “unsettling and not believable.”

The review also said the decision to use less-lethal munitions “may or may not have been reasonable” based on the Police Department’s existing policy at the time. “We recommend that further research should be conducted to identify and evaluate other munitions that are less prone to cause injuries, but are still effective as crowd control devices,” the reviewers concluded.

The review compared the city’s crowd-control effort to an aviation disaster caused not by a single mistake but by “a series of cascading events.” In Oakland’s case, the tragedy stemmed in part from years of “diminishing resources” and “increasing workload.”

The city ultimately agreed to a $4.5 million settlement with Olsen.

Once again, Oakland revised policies and training. For several years, Chanin said, the cycle of protests, shootings and lawsuits seemed to stop.

Then George Floyd demonstrations broke out, and so did the less-lethal weapons. According to a federal complaint filed in June by the Anti Police-Terror Project, Oakland officers indiscriminately launched projectiles, flash-bangs and tear gas into crowds and at individuals.

Attorneys for both sides in the case stipulated to an agreement that forbids Oakland police from using less-lethal weapons against demonstrators.

For Olsen, now tending bee colonies and chickens on a small Wisconsin farm, the memory with a hole came flooding back.

“We passed these regulations and policies to control the use of less-lethal weapons,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see other people’s lives affected as mine was. … Police have shown they do not care about these kinds of controls, so the next step is to take those weapons away from them.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, Hannah Norman and Liz Szabo of KHN contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/less-lethal-weapons-blind-maim-and-kill-victims-say-enough-is-enough/

[tipsofsoftware]

Killing of black man in Atlanta puts spotlight anew on police, as prosecutors contemplate charges against officer

Atlanta’s top prosecutor said his office will decide this week whether to bring charges against the police officer who shot Ray shard Brooks, a black man whose killing outside a Wendy’s on Friday sparked a fresh wave of protests against police violence in the Southern city and added fuel to nationwide anger over racial injustice.

Family members on Sunday recalled Brooks as a good father who was getting his life back together when he was shot and killed in a confrontation with Garrett Rolfe and another Atlanta police officer after a DUI stop.

Public outrage mounted across the country over the weekend, as demonstrators in New York, Los Angeles and other cities and towns took to the streets for the latest in a wave of protests prompted by last month’s killing of another black man, George Floyd, in the custody of Minneapolis police.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office determined Sunday that Brooks suffered organ damage and blood loss from two gunshot wounds, and that his official cause of death was “gunshot wounds of the back.”

Also on Sunday, Senate Republicans outlined a legislative proposal to enact police reforms — their answer to a sweeping bill introduced last week by House Democrats.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Brooks’ father, Larry Barbine, told The Washington Post in an interview from his Toledo home that the family was in shock, unable to accept that his son had been killed just as his life seemed to be going better than it had in years.

“I can’t understand why it happened like that,” Barbine said of the shooting. “I heard of his passing on Saturday. Not his passing, his murder. I’m just devastated.”

In an interview with “CBS This Morning” two days after her husband’s death, Tomika Miller, Brooks’ widow, called for the officers involved to be prosecuted.

“I want them to go to jail. . .. If it was my husband who shot them, he would be in jail,” Miller said in the interview, which will air in full Monday morning. “He would be doing a life sentence. They need to be put away.”

According to a preliminary report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, officers were dispatched Friday night to a Wendy’s in Atlanta on a complaint about a man parked and asleep in the drive-through. The officers performed a sobriety test on the man, later identified as Brooks. When Brooks failed the test, officers attempted to put him in custody. The response escalated, and Brooks grabbed an officer’s stun gun and began running away.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Video of the encounter appears to show Brooks turning back toward the officer and pointing the Taser at him, at which point the officer is seen drawing a weapon from his holster and firing at Brooks.

Paul Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, told CNN on Sunday that a decision on whether to bring charges in the case will be made “sometime around Wednesday.”

“He did not seem to present any threat to anyone,” Howard said of Brooks. “The fact that it would escalate to his death seems unreasonable.”

The police department has fired Rolfe, the officer who shot his gun, and pulled the other officer, Devin Brosnan, off street patrols. Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields resigned Saturday.

Efforts to reach Rolfe and Brosnan by phone on Sunday were unsuccessful. Vince Champion, Southeast regional director of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said the union is providing legal services to the officers but declined to make the lawyers available for an interview and said he was speaking for the officers.

He said he did not have much background on the officers and could not opine on whether the shooting was justified because “we have no investigation.”

“Unlike the district attorney, the former chief of police and the mayor, I don’t base my facts and do things just on one video,” Champion told The Post. “I do investigations, as I’ve done all my life as a police officer, and I get both sides of the story.”

Champion was critical of the decision to terminate Rolfe within 24 hours of the shooting, arguing that it was made to “pander” to rioters and that it denied the officer his due process rights.

And he said that after the chief’s resignation, officers in Atlanta now feel they have “nobody on their side.”

“We are in a Catch-22 between both sides at this point,” Champion said. “We’ve got the citizens that we depend on not liking us, we’ve got the administration and the government that we depend on not liking us. . .. We welcome changing, we always do. It’s the cities and counties that don’t want to pay for it.”

The University Avenue Wendy’s where Brooks was shot was in flames Saturday after a day of protests that continued into Sunday. Authorities announced a $10,000 reward for information about who started the fire.

Dozens of signs and bouquets of flowers lined the fence around what used to be the restaurant’s outdoor seating area. Protesters stood on the tables holding signs and chanting “Say his name!” and “Ray shard Brooks!” Spray-painted tributes on the walls read “RIP Ray shard.” And just before 5 p.m., a group of bikers pulled into the parking lot blasting anti-police songs by the 1990s rap group NWA.

Rolfe, the officer who shot Brooks, was hired in 2013, while the other officer, Brosnan, was hired in 2018, according to the Atlanta Police Department.

Rolfe was assigned to the department’s High Intensity Traffic Team, a special operations unit aimed at reducing alcohol- and drug-related traffic violations. Members of the team are “specially trained and equipped to detect and process alcohol and/or drug-impaired drivers,” according to a police department document, although it was not immediately clear whether the unit was still in operation.

In May 2019, Rolfe was awarded a silver pin for making between 50 and 99 DUI arrests within a year, the department said in a Facebook post at the time.

Rolfe was one of four officers accused of making a false arrest in March 2015. The Atlanta Citizen Review Board, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, ruled the claim against him as not sustained, meaning there was insufficient evidence to support a finding of misconduct, according to a document on the review board’s website. The allegation against one of the other officers involved was sustained, with the board recommending he receive additional training.

Friday’s shooting has drawn national attention. Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost in her bid for Georgia governor in 2018, said protesters were right to demand accountability and should continue to push for change until meaningful reforms are made.

“There’s a legitimacy to this anger. There’s a legitimacy to this outrage. A man was murdered because he was asleep in a drive-through, and we know that this is not an isolated occurrence,” she said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) noted that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had acted swiftly in the wake of the shooting. Scott said it was hard to parse whether the police had used excessive force.

“The question is, when the suspect turned to fire the Taser, what should the officer have done?” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

Lawyers for the Brooks family have said that Brooks was celebrating his daughter’s birthday earlier that night. Brooks had been looking forward to the party all week, according to Barbine.

“The night he got killed, he had had a few drinks and he was heading back. He had called me and he was telling me about the birthday party, and how he was glad to be with the kids. I asked him, ‘How are you and your wife coming along?’ and he said, ‘I’m back in good graces.’ And I told him, ‘That’s where you need to be,’” Barbine said.

Brooks was born and raised in Atlanta. He had some troubled years, Barbine said, but had recently settled down, straightened out his relationship with his wife, and was getting into a routine of working hard and showing up for their kids.

Kiara Owens, Brooks’ 26-year-old half-sister, said in an interview that Brooks worked in construction and traveled for the job, working gigs in Ohio, Mississippi, Texas and Florida. He had no real permanent residence for this reason, often staying in hotels or with family friends while in Atlanta, she said.

“I don’t fully fault the officers, I don’t fully fault my brother,” she said of the shooting. “Everyone was just trying to make it home that night.”

Bottoms announced Saturday that Interim Corrections Chief Rodney Bryant would take over leadership of the department as interim chief until a permanent replacement is found.

Bryant spent a long career in law enforcement, and held several high-level leadership roles in the Atlanta Police Department before retiring from it in April 2019 and later taking a role as acting head of the Atlanta City Detention Center. Bottoms said former chief Shields would remain with the department in a still-undetermined role.

 Amid the mounting calls for change at the national level, Senate Republicans plan to release a proposal on Wednesday that addresses officer misconduct, training and tactics, and a system for local departments to better report cases in which officers’ actions result in serious injury or death, two of the legislation’s authors said Sunday.

Scott and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who have been working on the GOP’s answer to a bill released by House Democrats last week, both endorsed a ban on chokeholds Sunday. But while Scott stressed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that both chambers of Congress and the White House “want to tackle the issue,” it is not clear whether such a ban will appear in the GOP bill.

In a bid to hold individual officers more accountable for their actions, the House Democrats’ proposal includes a provision to change the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” making it easier to sue officers who “recklessly” violate civil rights, whether or not they did so with intent. Scott called that provision a nonstarter.

“The president sent the signal that qualified immunity is off the table. They see that as a poison pill on our side,” Scott said on “Face the Nation.” “So we’re going to have to find a path that helps us reduce misconduct within the officers. But at the same time, we know that any poison pill in legislation means we get nothing done.”

Protests continued in several cities over the weekend. In New York, thousands of demonstrators dressed in white marched Sunday to draw attention to violence against black transgender people.

In California, activists and local authorities have demanded investigations into the hanging deaths of two black men in recent weeks.

On Saturday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger requested that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra investigate the death of Robert Fuller, a 24-year-old black man who was found hanging from a tree last week near city hall in Palmdale, about an hour north of downtown Los Angeles.

Becerra’s office did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. According to the Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner’s office, a decision on the cause of Fuller’s death has been deferred pending additional investigation.

More than 215,000 people have signed a petition demanding a full investigation, and at a briefing by city authorities on Friday, local residents questioned why Fuller’s death was originally classified as a suicide.

Authorities are also investigating a separate incident in which Malcolm Harsch, a 38-year-old black man, was found hanging from a tree near a homeless encampment in Victorville, about an hour east of Palmdale, on May 31.

The San Bernardo County Sheriff’s Department is conducting a death investigation but told the Victorville Daily Press on Saturday that no foul play is suspected.

An online petition for a probe into Hirsch’s death had garnered more than 16,000 signatures as of Sunday night.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/3hv5Q9G via IFTTT

[tennesseeprelawland]

The Legality Of Police Brutality

By Teresa Xu, Vanderbilt University Class of 2023

June 8, 2020

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota after being pinned down by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer.Floyd was accused of paying for goods with a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin placed his knee between Floyd’s head and neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, two minutes and 53 seconds of which was after Floyd became non-responsive. The three other officers accompanying Chauvin—Thomas Lane, J. Kueng, and Tou Thao—stood by, silently supporting Chauvin’s actions. Autopsy reports ruled that he had died by homicide, and the killing has been widely condemned as an act of racist police brutality and has sparked protests all over the US[1].

This is not the first time an unarmed Black person has been killed by police. Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade died this year due to police brutality as well. Ahmaud Arbery was shot while jogging in a “hate crime”. Eric Garner’s death in 2014 was in many ways similar to Floyd’s—he was an unarmed Black man who was placed in a chokehold by police and could not breathe [1]. These are just a few examples in a long history of police brutality and injustice towards African-Americans.

These actions violate fundamental laws and precedents in the US, so why do they keep happening? And to what extent do they really violate the law?

There are multiple laws intended to protect against police abuse of authority, which suggests that police brutality deserves punishment. The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches, seizures, and warrants[2]. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process of law in legal proceedings, mandating the right to a jury and protecting pre-trial detainees[3]. The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments” [4]. The Fourteenth Amendment prevents the deprivation of“any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” [5]. In addition to constitutional amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1871empowered President Ulysses Grant to use the armed forces to combat those who conspired to deny equal protection—specifically, the Ku Klux Klan, who were murdering many Black and even white people—and even to suspend habeas corpus and bypass typical judicial rule to enforce these actions, if needed[6, 7]. Furthermore, the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) makes an exception to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, in which suing a government entity without its express permission is not permitted: the FTCA allows specific types of lawsuits against federal employees who have caused injuries while acting within the scope of employment—which may be used to bring claims of intentional misconduct against police officers[8]. And in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Supreme Court held that the use of deadly force against an apparently unarmed and non-dangerous fleeing suspect is unconstitutional, and such force should only be used if necessary to prevent the escape and there is probable cause that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury[9]. Under this precedent, George Floyd did not qualify for such force. Finally, the Law Enforcement Misconduct Statute prohibits law enforcement officers from exercising conduct that violates lawful or constitutional rights, privileges, or immunities, and the US Department of Justice can file lawsuits to this end[10].

As part of the US’s lengthy and enduring struggle towards racial equality, there are also laws intended to prevent and punish racial discrimination specifically, as well as equal-opportunity acts intended to prevent discrimination in general. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, except as punishment for crime, and The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed Black voting rights [11, 12]. The Fourteenth Amendment also notably guarantees all citizens “the equal protection of the laws”, and this provision has been used in landmark discrimination cases like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which held that segregation of public education based on race violated the Fourteenth Amendment[5, 13]. Other equal-opportunity laws include The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin; the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing; and Title 42, Chapter 21 of the US Code, which prohibits discrimination in various settings—indeed, one subchapter, 42 U.S.C.§ 1983, allows anyone to seek damages against abusive police conduct[14, 15].

However, there are limitations on many of these laws, as well as laws to protect police officers from claims of abuse, all of which help explain why police brutality persists and often goes unpunished. For instance, United States v. Harris (1883) weakened the Fourteenth Amendment and 1871 Civil Rights Act: the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to state actions, not those of individuals, and since then, the Civil Rights Act of 1871 has been subject tovarious interpretation by courts[6]. It has also been found that 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is ineffective in deterring police brutality because the lawsuits are difficult and expensive to pursue and juries are more likely to believe the police officers’ accounts of incidents than plaintiffs’ [15]. The Law Enforcement Misconduct Statute has been similarly criticized because of its lack of inclusion of affected community members as part of accountability reforms, its failure to include a private right of action that would allow citizens to initiate lawsuits, its failure to encourage experimentation and sharing of information among jurisdictions, andthe federal government’s lack of enforcement[16]. Also, the Community Oriented Policing Program (COPS), which was developed in 1994 by the Department of Justice to support community-policing law enforcement initiatives and provides millions of dollars agencies every year, but there are no specific measures that condition the funding on increased transparency and accountability, allowing police to receive funding without significant punishment for unreported brutality[16].

The Supreme Court in particular has played a significant role in downplaying instances of excessive force in law enforcement. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), the plaintiff’s claim for injunctive relief against the use of police chokeholds was dismissed on the grounds that the case was non-justiciable [17]. In Graham v. Connor (1989), the Court held that claims of excessive force by officers had to be analyzed according to the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard, and this meant relying onofficers’ perspectives and judgments on the scene,crime severity, the threat posed by the suspect, and attempts by the suspect to resist or arrest, rather than taking into account subjective factors [18]. Most significantly, the doctrine of qualified immunity, first introduced by the Court in 1967, protects government officials from legal claims for actions committed within their official capacity, and it has become an effective shield in thousands of police brutality lawsuits [19]. The Supreme Court has expanded the scope of the doctrine over the years, protecting officers whose actions had been deemed unlawful, and its mandate has directed the district courts below them, causing more cases to be ruled in favor of the police rather than the injured and police brutality to be more overlooked[19].

Beyond institutional barriers, cultural beliefs and narratives are significant: how police brutality cases are portrayed by the government and perceived by the public can be used to silence victims’ counter narratives and justify police actions as well as court decisions [20] The broader cultural beliefs underpinning institutions and laws likely contribute to why juries are more likely to believe police officers than plaintiffs [15].

Altogether, there are multiple contradicting laws governing police authority that can be applied to any given case, underpinned by implicit racist biases and belief in a typical cultural narrative, rendering police brutality a complex issue with no clear solution. Still, protests and other forms of dissent, including years of criticisms from lawyers,legal scholars, civil rights groups, politicians, and judges,remind us that there is potential for change. Tighter restrictions on when and how police officers can use force has been shown to be effective, and this may be incentivized by amending the COPS program to predicate funding on increased accountability[16, 21]. Officers can also be trained to better recognize and handle cases involving mental illness and to focus efforts on communication rather than force [21]. Narrative fiction and efforts to change cultural narratives and norms can spark new policies and precedents. And even current Supreme Court justices of vastly different ideologies have criticized qualified immunity [19].

________________________________________________________________

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/happened-day-george-floyd-died-police-custody-200602162316383.html

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fifth_amendment

[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment

[5] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

[6] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/20/this-day-in-politics-april-20-1279376

[7] https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html

[8] https://www.justia.com/injury/federal-tort-claims-act-ftca/

[9] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/471/1/

[10] https://www.justice.gov/crt/law-enforcement-misconduct-statute-42-usc-14141

[11] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiii

[12] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxv

[13] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483

[14] https://civilrights.findlaw.com/discrimination/race-discrimination-applicable-laws.html

[15] https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3108&context=hastings_law_journal

[16] https://www.law.ua.edu/resources/pubs/lrarticles/Volume%2062/Issue%202/SIMMONS-Cooperative_Federalism.pdf

[17] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1982/81-1064

[18] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1988/87-6571

[19] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-immunity-scotus-specialrep-idUSKBN22K18C

[20] https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nylr74&div=11&id=&page=

[21] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/opinion/minneapolis-police-brutality.html

Photo Credit: Hillelfrei

[denisehil0]

‘We’re sick of it’: Anger over police killings shatters US

MINNEAPOLIS — Another night of unrest in every corner of the country left charred and shattered landscapes in dozens of American cities Sunday as years of festering frustrations over the mistreatment of African Americans at the hands of police boiled over in expressions of rage met with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Cars and businesses were torched, the words “I can’t breathe” were spray-painted all over buildings, a fire in a trash bin burned near the gates of the White House, and thousands marched peacefully through city streets to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man who died Monday after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck until he stopped breathing.

His death is one of a litany of racial tragedies that have thrown the country into chaos amid the coronavirus pandemic that has left millions out of work and killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S., including disproportionate numbers of black people.

“We’re sick of it. The cops are out of control,” protester Olga Hall said in Washington D.C. “They’re wild. There’s just been too many dead boys.”

People set fire to police cars, threw bottles at police officers and busted windows of storefronts, carrying away TVs and other items even as some protesters urged them to stop. In Indianapolis, police were investigating multiple shootings, including one that left a person dead amid the protests — adding to deaths in Detroit and Minneapolis in recent days.

In Minneapolis, the city where the protests began, police, state troopers and National Guard members moved in soon after an 8 p.m. curfew took effect to break up protests, firing tear gas and rubber bullets to clear streets outside a police precinct and elsewhere.

At least 13 police officers were injured in Philadelphia when peaceful protests turned violent and at least four police vehicles were set on fire. In New York City, dangerous confrontations flared repeatedly as officers made arrests and cleared streets. A video showed two NYPD cruisers lurching into a crowd of demonstrators who were pushing a barricade against one of them and pelting it with objects. Several people were knocked to the ground, and it was unclear if anyone was hurt.

“The mistakes that are happening are not mistakes. They’re repeated violent terrorist offences and people need to stop killing black people,” Brooklyn protester Meryl Makielski said.

Few corners of America were untouched, from protesters setting fires inside Reno’s city hall, to police launching tear gas at rock-throwing demonstrators in Fargo, North Dakota. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators flipped a police car and lit it on fire. Police said six people were arrested and a police officer was injured after being struck in the head with a baseball bat.

Police have arrested at least 1,669 people in 22 cities since Thursday, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Nearly a third of those arrests came in Los Angeles, where the governor declared a state of emergency and ordered the National Guard to back up the city’s 10,000 police officers as dozens of fires burned across the city.

The damage in U.S. cities came as many Americans plan to return to in-person church services on Sunday for the first time in several weeks since the pandemic forced a ban on large gatherings. Pastors in pulpits across the country will likely be urging peace amid the rubble of riots.

Trump appeared to cheer on the tougher tactics Saturday night, commending the National Guard deployment in Minneapolis, declaring “No games!” and saying police in New York City “must be allowed to do their job!”

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence as he continued to express common cause with those demonstrating after Floyd’s death.

“The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest,” Biden said in a statement Saturday night.

Overnight curfews were imposed in more than a dozen major cities nationwide, including Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle.

This week’s unrest recalled the riots in Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King, a black motorist who had led them on a high-speed chase. The protests of Floyd’s killing have gripped many more cities, but the losses in Minneapolis have yet to approach the staggering totals Los Angeles saw during five days of rioting in 1992, when more than 60 people died, 2,000-plus were injured and thousands arrested, with property damage topping $1 billion.

But not all protests were marred by violence. In Juneau, Alaska, local police joined protesters at a rally in front of a giant whale sculpture on the city’s waterfront.

“We don’t tolerate excessive use of force,” Juneau Police Chief Ed Mercer told a gathering where most people wore masks and some sang Alaska Native songs.

The show of force in Minneapolis came after three days when police largely avoided engaging protesters, and after the state poured in more than 4,000 National Guard troops to Minneapolis and said the number would soon rise to nearly 11,000.

“The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd,” said Gov. Tim Walz, who also said local forces had been overmatched the previous day. “It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”

Some residents were glad to see the upheaval dissipating.

“l live here. I haven’t been able to sleep,” said Iman Muhammad, whose neighbourhood saw multiple fires set Friday night. Muhammad said she sympathized with peaceful protests over Floyd’s death but disagreed with the violence: “Wrong doesn’t answer wrong.”

___

Numerous AP journalists contributed from across the U.S.

Tim Sullivan And Stephen Groves, The Associated Press

Do you need a Disability Lawyer in Toronto?

Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers is a leading Toronto injury law practice. Our attorneys feel it is their duty to help you to uncover the government and also health companies who can likewise assist you in your roadway to healing. 

Neinstein Injury Lawyers has actually dealt with serious accident claims throughout Greater Ontario for over 5 decades. Its locations of proficiency consist of medical, legal, and insurance coverage concerns related to healthcare carelessness, car accidents, disability claims, slip and falls, product liability, insurance coverage disputes, and much more.

Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers

1200 Bay St Suite 700, Toronto, ON M5R 2A5, Canada

MJ96+X3 Toronto, Ontario, Canada

neinstein.com

+1 416-920-4242

Visit Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers https://neinstein.ca/about-us/ Follow Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers on Pinterest Watch Neinstein on Vimeo

Contact Erik Joffe at Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers

Read More

[wilsoninjury]

If your loved one have been injured at the office, contact the Minneapolis Office Injury Attorneys at Robert Wilson & Associates, have 25 years of experience in helping workers with filing a workers’ compensation claim, so that they get compensation for their injuries and losses. Call today at (612) 334-3444.

[itsfinancethings]

After Wayne Fella Morrison’s death in detention in 2016, his sibling Latoya Aroha Rule organized rallies to call for justice for him and the hundreds of other Aboriginal people who have died in custody across Australia.

The circumstances of Morrison’s death drew national attention at the time: He was pinned down by correctional officers. His hands and feet were bound with restraints, a spit-hood was pulled over his head and he was placed face-down in the back of a prison van. When he was taken out, minutes later, he was blue and unresponsive.

About 500 people showed up for a march in Adelaide in October 2016 and 150 supporters turned out to events in Melbourne and Sydney.

But, earlier this month, tens of thousands of took the streets for Black Lives Matter protests in cities across Australia following the killing of George Floyd in the United States. Rule, who uses the pronoun “they,” has been blown away by the response. “Wayne’s name is up on banners in marches of tens of thousands of people. That’s not something I ever thought would be possible. It’s incredible,” they say.

Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, Minn. has sparked protests in solidarity on almost every continent. Some 9,000 miles away in Australia, it is focusing renewed attention on a longstanding problem: the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody.

“A lot of people were not aware of the amount of Aboriginal deaths in custody that were occurring,” says Cheryl Axleby, co-chair of the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (NATSILS) and the CEO of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in Adelaide.

She tells TIME: “I think it’s sort of ignited a passion in mainstream Australians who are saying, ‘This is not acceptable in our country, and why haven’t we done anything about it?'”

Photo courtesy of Latoya Aroha Rule Latoya Aroha Rule (L) and Wayne Fella Morrison (R)

‘Not getting the results we want’

Aboriginal Australians have faced a legacy of oppression. Mass killings and imported diseases wiped out the majority of the population within years of the British arrival in the late 18th century. Later, they were subject to officially-sanctioned killings and the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Members of the so-called Stolen Generation were placed in church missions and other institutions in a bid to assimilate them into white society.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday, University of New South Wales professor (UNSW) Don Weatherburn said: “You can’t invade a country, drive the original inhabitants off their land, destroy their way of life, pass on your diseases, herd them into camps or on to islands, forcibly remove their children and expect this to have no long-term adverse effects.”

Today, Aboriginal people die about 8 years earlier and earn about 33% less than other Australians. They are more likely to struggle with mental health issues and to face domestic violence. There is also a high proportion of Aboriginal people in the prison system. In 2019, Indigenous Australians, who account for only about 2 to 3% of Australia’s population, made up 28% of the prison population.

June Oscar, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, tells TIME that over the last 10 years, there has been an 88% increase in the number of Aboriginal people incarcerated.

Such trends are reflected in the comparatively high number of deaths of Indigenous Australians in custody. At least 437 Aboriginal people died in custody from 2008 to 2020, according to Deaths Inside, a reporting project by Guardian Australia.

An official inquiry into previous deaths in custody made 339 recommendations to address the problem in 1991. A government-ordered review in 2018 found that 78% of the recommendations were fully or mostly implemented. However, many experts say meaningful changes haven’t been made. A group of academics called the report “misleadingly positive” in a letter published at the end of 2018.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on June 12 that reducing the incarceration rate is a complex and difficult task. Official statistics show that more than 60% of Aboriginal people in prison from 1990 to 2004 were there on violent crimes, and 65% of deaths were “self-inflicted.”

“It’s health policy, it’s youth policy, it’s a suicide policy, it’s employment policy, it’s welfare policy—this is an incredibly complicated area and not all Indigenous experiences are the same,” he said. “There is no shortage of funds being thrown at this issue, but clearly the application of funds by governments over decades and decades and decades is not getting the results we want.”

Still, not one person has yet been convicted in the death of an Aboriginal person in custody, although police officers involved in the recent deaths of two Aboriginal people have been charged with murder and are awaiting trial, and a coroner has referred the 2017 death of 55-year-old Tanya Day to prosecutors.

A ‘real potential for change’

Although the issue has been a talking point for Australians for years, the problem appears to be entering the public conversation in a way that it hasn’t in the past. Since the start of June, tens of thousands of people have marched across Australia, in Sydney and Melbourne and in smaller cities like Darwin, Perth and Adelaide.

Those marching have held signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and others with the names of those who have died in custody scrawled on them. One of the deaths highlighted is that of David Dungay Jr., who died in 2015 at the age of 26 after being held down by prison guards as he screamed “I can’t breathe” several times.

“To see 20,000 Australians to show up and rally in solidarity with David Dungay Jr. and George Floyd in the middle of a pandemic is astounding, and for the first time, I sense a real potential for change,” says George Newhouse, the lead lawyer at the National Justice Project, which is working with the Dungay family.

James D. Morgan—Getty Images Thousands of protestors marching in solidarity with “Black Lives Matter” down Castlereagh Street in the CBD in Sydney, Australia on June 06, 2020.

Local media reports that 25,000 Australians donated to a GoFundMe campaign set up for Indigenous rights in the first days June, contributing a combined $1 million.

“I’ve taken too long to open my eyes up on what’s happening in my own backyard,” commented someone who donated to a fundraiser for the Dungay family.

The Prime Minister has sparked criticism for his response to the protests. He said in early June that there was “no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia,” and he has called for those who protested in violation of COVID-19 social distancing rules to face charges. He also drew widespread criticism when he said during a June 11 interview that Australia had no history of slavery, a claim he later walked back and apologized for.

But there are already some signs that the latest protests is sparking government action. Following protests in Sydney, a parliamentary inquiry into how deaths in custody are investigated in the state of New South Wales was launched.

“It is a really good thing now that Australia has sort of opened its eyes to what’s going on in its own country, but it’s heartbreaking, it takes up to tens of thousands of people protesting for them to acknowledge what we’re going through,” 28-year-old Apryl Day, the daughter of Tanya Day, tells TIME.

The elder Day died from head injuries after being taken off a train for public drunkenness and placed in a cell, where she fell and hit her head. An investigation into her death found that the train conductor’s decision to call the police was “influenced by her Aboriginality.” Prison officers failed to check on her every 30 minutes as per guidelines.

“She should be here today with her family, her grandkids. She deserved so much more than what she received,” Apryl Day says.

Photo courtesy of Charandev Singh Apryl Day (L) and her siblings in 2019

A major shift is needed

Some are cautious about what this moment might mean for Aboriginal rights. “There is a national reflex of denial and deflection of concerns about discrimination,” Tim Soutphommasane, a sociology and political theory professor at the University of Sydney, tells TIME. “Many Australians simply don’t see racism as a problem within our institutions.”

A study released this month by researchers at Australian National University found that three in four Australians have an implicit negative bias against Indigenous Australians.

Actor and writer Meyne Wyatt, whose recent television performance of a monologue about racism in Australia has gained national attention, tells TIME that he had his first encounter with law enforcement when he was just 11 years old. Police stopped him on his way to a skate park.

“We were stopped for no reason other than racial profiling,” Wyatt says. “From that point on, I knew the relationship that I had with police that would be a negative one.”

Meyne Wyatt closes #QandA with a monologue from his play, City of Gold. pic.twitter.com/9ALFIYRAnq

— QandA (@QandA) June 8, 2020

UNSW’s Weatherburn, who is also a former director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, told TIME that police behavior towards Aboriginal people did need to improve, but a wider set of problems—unemployment, substance abuse, violence, poor school performance and child neglect— also needed to be addressed.

“Everybody is picking the low hanging fruit, the change to police procedure, and that’s important but it’s not going to address the elephant in the room,” he said.

While many of the demands of those fighting for Aboriginal peoples’ rights do call for changes to policing, like accountability for deaths in custody and independent investigations of police abuse allegations, many recognize the need for wider changes. Activists are calling for treatment options (rather than criminal penalties) for drug and alcohol abuse, and are demanding anti-racism programs in schools and workplaces as well as an end to what is seen as a systemic racism that leads to disproportionate incarceration rates. Many also say the age of criminal liability should be raised from 10 to 14 years old to stop Aboriginal children from ending up in jail, which can push them into a lifetime of cycling in and out of the prison system.

Activists say that they hope the Australians now paying renewed attention to their cause will help them to make their voices heard.

“We’ve seen great support from non-Aboriginal people asking what they can do, they’re donating to Aboriginal causes, they’re raising awareness,” says Axleby. “We’re hoping they will take these issues up with their own local politicians and those in power to say that change must occur.”

Some of those fighting for justice say the movement in the U.S. gives them reason for optimism.

Grieving for Morrison, Latoya Rule cites a call for Minneapolis to defund its police department and invest in community development as a major boost. “I got so much hope I cried. That looks like real structural, systemic change, and that’s a moment that I’d love to see here in Australia.”

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911 or seek care from a local hospital or mental-health provider.