Tag: police brutality

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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Family Granted $26 Million After Body Cam Showed Cop Execute Innocent Unarmed Child

On a Saturday night in a North Texas town in 2017, 15-year-old Jordan Edwards was murdered by a Balch Springs police officer. Jordan was a passenger in a car that had merely driven away from a party. Immediately after police killed him, the chief parrotted his officer’s false claim of fearing for his life as the vehicle drove “aggressively toward him.”

After watching the body-camera footage, however, the chief realized he’d spread a lie. So, he did the right thing and told the public the truth — the car was not a threat and was driving away.

Police Chief Jonathan Haber admitted that the car full of innocent teenagers was driving away from the officer when he raised his AR-15 and shot Jordan Edwards in the head.

“It did not meet our core values,” Haber said of the officer’s actions.

Based on the extensive reporting the Free Thought Project has done on officers shooting into vehicles, we predicted the original story would probably not be backed up by the body-camera footage, and we were correct.

The shooting was so egregious that Oliver was found guilty of murder in 2018 and was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Now, six years after Balch Springs Police officer Roy Oliver raised his AR-15 and dumped multiple rounds into a car full of innocent children — executing one of them — Jordan’s family has the rest of their closure. The family’s federal civil rights trial began last week and concluded on Monday with a $26.1 million settlement: $8.5 million to Edwards’ father, Odell, for damages; $2.1 million in estate for damages such as mental anguish and funeral expenses; and $11 million in punitive damages.

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Cops Kidnap Elderly Deaf Woman, Strip Her Down & Break Her Arm Because She Couldn’t Hear Them

In an appalling case of police brutality, a 71-year-old deaf Florida woman found herself spending three days in jail and suffering a broken arm at the hands of Austin’s finest. All of this happened simply because she was unable to hear instructions from a gate agent at an airport and asked twice to get on an earlier flight.

As violent crime rates continue to rise and go unsolved across the nation, this incident serves as a chilling reminder of how police choose to go after “low-hanging fruit” and target vulnerable individuals in our society rather than violent criminals.

On September 13, 2022, Karen McGee was connecting in Austin on her way to Seattle. As a nervous flyer traveling alone for the first time in her life, she was already feeling overwhelmed. To make matters worse, her hearing aid wasn’t functioning properly.

Unbeknownst to her, she missed a gate change announcement for her flight. As her departure time passed and she didn’t see her flight boarding, she approached an Alaska Airlines gate agent for assistance. Although she was rebooked on a later flight that evening, McGee mistakenly thought there was another plane at the same gate headed to Seattle and inquired if she could get on that flight instead.

Struggling to hear the agent’s explanation, McGee asked another Alaska Airlines employee for help. Shockingly, instead of providing assistance to the senior citizen, the agent called the police.

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Police Use “Less Lethal” Weapons to Crush Social Movements Across the World

This week, the City of Philadelphia agreed to a $9.25 million settlement with protesters who were brutalized with tear gas and pepper spray during demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020.

Such accountability for police who crush protests with crowd-control weapons is rare both in the United States and across the world. The settlement comes as researchers report that police in dozens of countries have routinely injured and even killed demonstrators with crowd-control weapons since 2015 as governments cracked down on protests.

Injuries from crowd-control weapons are increasing and widespread both in authoritarian nations such as Iran and China as well as “democratic” countries that supposedly tolerate dissent and public assemblies, according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO). The report, “Lethal in Disguise: How Crowd-Control Weapons Impact Health and Human Rights,” found that more than 121,000 people globally were injured or killed by so-called less lethal crowd-control weapons such as chemical irritants, “flash bang” grenades and rubber bullets since 2015, although many other injuries likely went unreported.

From the uprisings in Iraq and Chile in 2019, to mass movements against regimes in Iran, Myanmar and Peru, clashes between police forces and social movements challenging government corruption and demanding basic rights are now a worldwide public health concern, according to the report. So far this month, crowd-control weapons were reportedly used against protesters in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Italy, Kenya, Mozambique, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the U.S.

“The repression of demonstrations remains as global as protest itself,” said INCLO Program Coordinator Lucila Santos in a statement. “In addition to the growing violent use of crowd-control weapons, since 2016 we have seen new technologies deployed by governments with next to no accountability or oversight whatsoever.”

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DOJ Accuses Louisville Police Of Civil Rights Violations, Discrimination After Breonna Taylor Investigation

Louisville’s police routinely violate constitutional rights and federal law, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said following a two-year investigation following the death of Breonna Taylor.

The DOJ announced the findings of its investigation on Wednesday in a press conference and 90-page report. Federal investigators said their review found that officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law.”

Some of the report’s findings include use of excessive force, executing search warrants without knocking or announcing, using invalid search warrants, and violating the rights of protesters.

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