Tag: police brutality

Police killings more likely in agencies that get military gear, data shows

Hardware designed for war exerts subtle pressure on police culture, experts say.

Americans have seen it time and again in recent months on the nightly news: Protesters in the streets confronted by local police officers carrying assault rifles, some atop armored vehicles, looking more like soldiers than public servants.

Much of that equipment has trickled down to police departments from a controversial Defense Department initiative known as the 1033 program, a 30-year-old federal initiative that provides a way for the military to dispose of surplus equipment by sending it to local police.

The impact on policing has been huge. In Georgia alone, police departments and sheriff’s offices have received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.

To get the military equipment, police departments pay only for the shipping costs. But that does not mean the program comes without other costs.

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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH DETAILS NYPD ATTACK ON PEACEFUL PROTESTERS

NEW YORK POLICE deliberately assaulted dozens of peaceful protesters, medics, and legal observers in one of this summer’s most violently repressed protests, trapping people in the streets past a city-imposed curfew before beating and arresting them in what Police Commissioner Dermot Shea described as “a plan which was executed nearly flawlessly.”

At least 236 people were arrested at the June 4 protest in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, and at least 61 were injured by police, with some left with broken noses and fingers, lost teeth, and potential nerve damage, according to a detailed report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. “The police response to the peaceful Mott Haven protest was intentional, planned, and unjustified,” the report concluded. “The protest was peaceful until the police responded with violence.”

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Sheriff & DA Arrested for Destroying Video of Cops Killing Man on ‘LIVE PD’ Over Bright Headlights

 Javier Ambler, a 40-year-old postal worker, was on his way home from a friendly poker game when he allegedly made the mistake of failing to turn off his brights when passing another vehicle. This is something everyone who is reading this article has likely done at some point in their life. However, because Ambler drove past a Williamson County sheriff’s deputy, an hour later, he’d be dead.

Ambler was killed last year and investigators with the Williamson County sheriff’s department investigated themselves and determined that the deputies did not violate the agency’s pursuit or use-of-force policies. This was in spite of the fact that Ambler’s death was ruled a homicide.

Now, we may have some insight into why all the officers were cleared. A Williamson County grand jury has indicted Sheriff Robert Chody for felony evidence tampering in Ambler’s death. According to court documents, Chody is accused of destroying video recordings and audio recordings in the investigation into Ambler’s death “with the intent to impair their availability as evidence in the investigation, “KVUE reports.

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Police Apologize For Deploying Taser Shields To Use Against Protesters

The Shelby County Sheriff’s office in Tennesee has come under fire after deploying taser shields to protests that sprang up in response to the lack of charges against the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. After the strange shields were noticed by a group of protesters who gathered in front of the Criminal Justice Center, and images of the shields went viral online, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner was forced to apologize for the deployment of the shields, calling it a “regrettable mistake.”

In a statement, the sheriff’s office said that Bonner has “directed policy modifications that will prohibit those shields from being displayed or used outside of the Jail again.”

According to WREG, the sheriff’s office recently upgraded to the newest e-shields in July 2020 but has had other “less lethal shock shields” since a jail riot in the 1990s. The shields reportedly cost $895 each.

Police often use shields as weapons during protests. Just this week, an LA County Sheriff’s deputy was seen on film repeatedly striking a protester with a riot shield. Luckily, in that case, it was just a normal riot shield and not a taser shield, but one could imagine how much more dangerous these encounters could be if these devices were commonly deployed by police departments across the country. Luckily, there were no reports of the taser shields being used on any of the protesters in Tennessee.

Hunter Demster, one of the activists that saw the officers wielding the shields suggested that they were being used to intimidate the protesters.

“They are scary looking and once again I think that’s the point, to chill our 1st Amendment-protected rights,” Demster told Fox13 Memphis.

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