Tag: police brutality

Cops Handcuff 9yo Boy With Special Needs to a Pole, Forcibly Hospitalize Him for Episode in Class

The Walpole Public School System and the Walpole Police Department in Massachusetts are facing public outrage after handcuffing a 9-year-old student to a pole during a mental health crisis, further exemplifying the systemic issues in our schools and the increasing tendency to rely on the American police state. Lawyers for Civil Rights and Anderson Krieger LLC law firm have written a letter to the involved parties demanding wide-ranging reform in response to this disturbing incident.

On January 12, the third-grade student, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and delayed intelligence, faced a dysregulated episode in class. The student’s individualized education plan contained specific procedures for positive reinforcement to regulate his behavior. Instead of following those guidelines, school staff called the school resource officer, who then summoned officers from the Walpole Police Department.

Remember, this is a 9-year-old boy… not a hardened armed criminal on the run.

Nevertheless, two officers arrived and forcibly handcuffed the child to a pole, restraining his arms and legs before taking him to a local hospital. He was held in adult custody, unable to reach his mother until his discharge. Erika Richmond, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, stated, “The actions taken by Walpole Public Schools and the Walpole Police Department against this 9-year-old boy were egregious, age-inappropriate, and directly contradicted the school’s own guidance for regulating his behavior.”

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Police Get a Green Light to Use Force Against Unarmed Individuals Who Have Already Surrendered or Complied

The U.S. Supreme Court has once again refused to hold police accountable for using force on unarmed individuals who have already surrendered or complied with police orders. Despite a series of high-profile incidents involving the use of unnecessary and excessive force by police against unarmed individuals, the Court declined to narrow the scope of qualified immunity granted to officers who assault non-violent suspects who have ceased to resist arrest.

Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute and Cato Institute had filed a joint amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Salazar v. Molina, challenging a lower court ruling that essentially gives police a green light to punish and harm suspects solely based upon their initial nonviolent resistance or flight. The legal coalition warned that the ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which granted qualified immunity to a police officer who tased a non-violent suspect in the back after he lay down to surrender, undermines public safety by discouraging suspects from surrendering or complying with police commands.

“The old police motto to ‘protect and serve’ has become ‘comply or die,’” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat ‘we the people’ like suspects and criminals.”

In March 2014, around 2:00 a.m., a sheriff’s deputy in Zapata County, Texas, tried to pull over Juan Carlos Salazar for speeding. However, Salazar accelerated and led police on a high-speed chase for approximately five minutes. After two vehicles pulled out in front of Salazar and blocked his way forward, Salazar stopped his car, got out, raised his hands, and then lay face-down on the ground with his arms above his head to surrender. There was no indication that Salazar had any weapon or was violent. But within seconds, a sheriff’s deputy ran up and fired his taser at Salazar’s back while he was still lying prone on the ground.

Salazar subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming that the deputy used excessive force in violation of his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure. The deputy moved to dismiss the lawsuit by claiming that he was entitled to qualified immunity. Although the trial court disagreed with the deputy, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that when a suspect has tried to evade capture, officers can question whether the suspect’s purported surrender is a ploy. Despite there being no reasonable indication of any such ploy by Salazar, the Fifth Circuit found that the deputy was entitled to qualified immunity and therefore dismissed the lawsuit against him.

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Excessive force, cover-ups: LAPD whistleblower expands ‘SWAT Mafia’ allegations

Anthony Soderberg was wounded, no longer armed and positioned precariously on a steep embankment when Los Angeles Police Lt. Ruben Lopez radioed to the surrounding SWAT team that the mentally ill man they’d just flushed from a nearby home remained a threat and must not be allowed to leave.

SWAT Sgt. Tim Colomey, a crisis negotiator standing next to Lopez in the command center, was stunned — interpreting the remark, as he knew other officers would, as a kill order.

“What the f— did you just say?” Colomey asked Lopez, just before the barrage of gunfire erupted.

“It was like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” Colomey recalled. Officers outside “just started blasting away.”

In a frank and far-ranging legal deposition in March, the former SWAT sergeant offered extensive new details in support of allegations he first made in 2020 that the LAPD’s most elite tactical unit — a model for similar units across the country — is deeply corrupt and controlled by a violent inner circle known as the “SWAT Mafia.”

The 27-year LAPD veteran, who speaks quickly in a thick Boston accent, provided the deposition under oath as part of a lawsuit against the department and the city, in which he alleges he was transferred out of SWAT as retaliation for whistleblowing about the violence. He is seeking unspecified damages.

The city has denied Colomey’s claims in court; Lopez declined to comment on the allegations.

It is the SWAT team’s job to confront the most dangerous situations, and its members are specifically trained to end threats to the community. They are equipped and armed accordingly — and, department officials have said, rarely use force.

The Los Angeles Police Department as a whole has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, including over its multibillion-dollar budget and its use of force. Colomey’s allegations and other recent scandals involving SWAT members have intensified the spotlight on the team.

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30 Years Later, Waco is Still Damning

Thirty years ago, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never honestly portrayed the federal abuses and political deceit that led to that carnage.

What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains 30 years ago?

Purported Good Intentions Absolve Real Deadly Force

Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Florida, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross violations of due process. Reno approved the FBI assault after being told “babies were being beaten.” It is not known who told her about the false claims of child abuse; Reno claimed she couldn’t remember. Her sterling reputation helped the government avoid any apparent culpability for the deaths of 27 children on April 19, 1993. After Reno publicly promised to take responsibility for the outcome at Waco, the media conferred instant sainthood upon her. At a press conference the day after the fire, President Bill Clinton declared, “I was frankly—surprised would be a mild word—to say that anyone that would suggest that the Attorney General should resign because some religious fanatics murdered themselves.” According to a Federal News Service transcript, the White House press corps applauded Clinton’s comment on Reno.

It Is Not an Atrocity If the U.S. Government Does It

Shortly before the Waco showdown, U.S. government officials signed an international Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty pledging never to use nerve agents, mustard gas, and other compounds (including tear gas) against enemy soldiers. But the treaty contained a loophole permitting governments to gas their own people. On April 19, 1993, the FBI pumped CS gas and methyl chloride, a potentially lethal, flammable combination, into the Davidians’ residence for six hours, disregarding explicit warnings that CS gas should not be used indoors. Benjamin Garrett, executive director the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, observed that the CS gas “would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly. Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell.” A 1975 U.S. Army publication on the effects of CS gas noted, “Generally, persons reacting to CS are incapable of executing organized and concerted actions and excessive exposure to CS may make them incapable of vacating the area.”

Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) declared that “the deaths of dozens of men, women and children can be directly and indirectly attributable to the use of this gas in the way it was injected by the FBI.” Chemistry professor George Uhlig testified to Congress in 1995 that the FBI gas attack probably “suffocated the children early on” and may have converted their poorly ventilated bunker into an area “similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.” But during those 1995 hearings, congressional Democrats portrayed the CS gas as innocuous as a Flintstone vitamin.

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NEW YORK’S IMPRISONED WOMEN BRAVE RISKS TO SUE SEXUAL ABUSERS UNDER NEW LAW

Kim Brown says she met a lieutenant at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 1996 or 1997 when she was sent to his office for disciplinary reasons. But the officer seemed unusually interested in her.

“He started calling me down, and I didn’t understand why,” she told The Appeal. I didn’t do anything.” Their initial meetings were “under the guise of interviewing me about things that were going on in the facility,” she said. “And then it became light. He would offer me a drink.”

Brown eventually relented to the pressure from a man with near-total control over her life inside the prison—a situation she now sees as sexual abuse. Today, Brown feels she finally has one way to fight back: She is among nearly 1,000 women filing claims so far this year as part of New York’s Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which briefly waives New York’s statute of limitations requirements to file sexual abuse lawsuits.

But while the new law is intended to address past harm, Brown is one of only a small number of women likely to be doing so from prison. For incarcerated people like Brown, filing a claim—or even talking about what happened to them—carries unique risks. Among numerous claims, currently or formerly incarcerated people have alleged that guards have coerced women into performing oral sex in plain view of others, refused to allow imprisoned people to file complaints under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, forced women to perform sex acts by threatening discipline; locked people in prison facilities and assaulted them; and a host of other serious incidents.

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INDIANA JAIL LET MAN WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA STARVE TO DEATH IN SOLITARY, LAWSUIT ALLEGES

On July 20, 2021, apartment managers entered 29-year-old Indiana resident Joshua McLemore’s home, found him confused, incoherent, and nude on the floor, and had McLemore transported to a Seymour, Indiana, hospital. McLemore’s mother had called her son’s living complex, worried he could have been having a psychotic episode. At the hospital, McLemore grabbed a nurse’s hair and the Seymour Police Department arrested him on battery charges.

At the Jackson County Jail, McLemore, who had schizophrenia, was stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement in what was known as “Padded Cell 7,” a small room without toilet access.

Surveillance footage over 21 days shows him screaming; rocking back and forth; licking the walls; smearing his feces and urine all over the floor; violently shoving a plastic bottle into his rectum; throwing his food on the ground; and eating the styrofoam food trays that made their way through the thin slot at the cell door.

According to the lawsuit, he lost 45 pounds in less than a month. Jail staff rarely checked in on him. Jackson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) employees occasionally placed McLemore in restraints and wheeled him into a shower as JCSO forced other imprisoned people to clean the excrement in his cell. On August 8, a guard named Beverly texted her supervisor, “Just bathed him. And he can’t hold his hands, legs, anything. He’s dead weight.”

In the footage, McLemore’s body visibly shrinks over weeks until he doesn’t have the strength to hold his head up.

“Get up, buddy,” a corrections officer asks. But he can’t. In one portion of the footage, a female guard sprays him with liquid soap and hoses him down so that he does not smell before EMS comes.

On August 8, jail officials noticed that McLemore—visibly emaciated and unable to hold up his body—likely needed medical care. But medical officials were unable to save him. According to a suit, doctors listed McLemore’s cause of death as “multiple organ failure due to refusal to eat or drink with altered mental status due to untreated schizophrenia.”

McLemore’s family alleges that at least 20 people, including Sheriff Rick Meyer, had access to roughly 400 hours of footage of McLemore wasting away in his cell. Edwin Budge, the family’s attorney, said he could not understand why no one called 911 earlier.

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California cops joked about shooting Black mayor and celebrated beating suspects: text messages

Newly revealed text messages sent by police in Antioch, California show that officers for years engaged in racist conduct and celebrated their own brutality while facing no pushback at all from superiors.

Among other things, the Mercury News reports, officers in Antioch made racist jokes about offering a “prime rib dinner” to anyone who shot Mayor Lamar Thorpe with projectiles often used on protesters.

Other messages show officers boasting about violence they inflicted on others while at times lamenting they didn’t go further in making alleged perpetrators suffer.

One particularly egregious text sent by Antioch Officer Eric Rombough lamented that the injuries he inflicted on a suspect wouldn’t be as readily visible as he had hoped.

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7 Black People Killed After Cops Falsely Discover a Gun That was Never There

In a number of police brutality cases, the actions of a police officer are justified if the person is holding or reaching for a firearm, even when it is found later that the cop made a mistake. Recently, a Missouri Prosecutor has decided not to criminally charge two Independence Police Department officers who shot and killed 39-year-old Tyrea Pryor after a car crash after mistaking him for holding a gun.

Pryor’s case is one of many examples of police brutality but here are seven examples of cops pulling the “they had a gun” card.

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Video Shows Cops Beat a Naked Black Man to Death With Handcuffs as Brass Knuckles

A throng of corrections officers at a Memphis jail used handcuffs as makeshift brass knuckles to beat a Black inmate and kneeled on his back and neck until he went limp in a pool of blood, according to surveillance video. And for minutes, they administered no aid, including CPR. 

The county medical examiner ruled Gershun Freeman’s death on Oct. 5, 2022, a homicide. Ever since, the 33-year-old’s family and friends have demanded the officers involved be punished and the notorious Shelby County Jail where it happened be reformed. Now, a federal civil rights complaint filed Tuesday reveals new details of the horror Freeman experienced, including analysis of the jail’s blurry, 13-minute surveillance video.

“The gatekeepers are supposed to keep, but instead they abuse their authority with violence,” Kimberly Freeman, Gershun’s mother, told VICE News. “We are mountain climbers for my son, Gershun. Living wasn’t in vain.”

The incident began when corrections officers approached Freeman’s cell in what was known as the “suicide pod,” on the fourth floor of the jail, to serve dinner, according to court documents. Freeman seemed to be experiencing a mental health crisis and was housed naked and alone to minimize the risk of self-harm. But instead of serving his tray through the door slot, which was common practice, surveillance video shows two officers approached Freeman’s cell and pointed a can of mace at him as a third officer opened the doors remotely from the other side of the hallway.

In the surveillance video, Freeman is seen shielding himself from the mace with an orange piece of fabric, which he was given for warmth, and darting out of the cell. His family’s attorneys say he wasn’t attempting to hit anyone but “bat away the mace can in the deputy’s hand.” Then, the other officer hit Freeman with a haymaker punch, which knocked him to the ground, surveillance video shows.

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