Tag: police killings

He told on ‘badge bending’ and was fired. Now, former Vallejo cop will get nearly $1 million

A former police captain who alleges in a lawsuit that he was fired for whistleblowing on his colleagues and exposing corruption within the Vallejo Police Department will receive nearly $1 million in a settlement with the city.

John Whitney and his attorney, Jayme Walker, agreed to the settlement last week, in which the city will be required to pay Whitney $900,000 as well as all costs, liens and attorney fees.

“I feel vindicated by the settlement agreement because of the amount,” Whitney told The Times in an interview Monday. “You don’t settle for nearly $1 million if you did everything correct.”

Whitney alleges in a lawsuit filed against the city and his former employers in 2020 that he was fired after he told Vallejo City Manager Greg Nyhoff, Mayor Bob Sampayan and then-City Atty. Claudia Quintana that members of the Police Department were bending the corners of their badges to commemorate every time an officer killed a civilian.

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Cop caught on bodycam laughing about grad student killed in police car collision

Newly released bodycam footage reveals a Seattle police officer laughed and made light of the death of a young woman who was struck and killed by a cop car, joking she had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check.”

Officer Daniel Auderer can be heard in the video discussing the investigation into the wreck involving 23-year-old grad student Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck and killed by his colleague, Officer Kevin Dave, on Jan. 23.

“She is dead,” Auderer says before bursting out laughing. “No, it’s a regular person,” he says, referring to Kandula.

Toward the end of the video, Auderer can be heard saying, through bursts of laughter, “Yeah, just write a check. Eleven thousand dollars. She was 26 anyway,” he said, misstating the victim’s age. “She had limited value.”

Auderer, who serves as the Seattle Police Guild’s vice president, also mentions in the clip that he did not believe a criminal investigation was being conducted.

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UNLOCKING THE BLACK BOX OF IN-CUSTODY DEATHS

Arrest and incarceration are uniquely dangerous experiences, regardless of where they take place. People die every day in law enforcement custody. In jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers. On sidewalks, city streets, and in their homes. From violence, neglect, and suicide. Despite the frequency of in-custody deaths, their exact scope remains unknown and data is often intentionally obfuscated by the refusal of states to comply with federally mandated reporting requirements.

More than two decades ago, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), requiring states to report the number of people who die in custody or during arrest. But authorities have resisted implementing the DCRA, resulting in incomplete data that likely drastically undercounts the actual figures. Although the DCRA authorized the federal government to financially penalize states that fail to meet reporting requirements, enforcement has been lax.

In a recently released book, Death In Custody: How America Ignores The Truth and What We Can Do About It, authors Roger A. Mitchell Jr. and Jay D. Aronson argue that deaths in law enforcement custody amount to a public health emergency. Their work ties in high-profile examples and shows how journalists have long done the work of tracking in-custody deaths—from Ida B. Wells famously investigating extrajudicial lynchings in the late 19th century, to the Washington Post’s comprehensive database of police shooting deaths beginning in 2015.

Mitchell and Aronson argue that collecting accurate data is the first step toward addressing this crisis. To do this, they propose amending U.S. death certificates to begin accounting for in-custody deaths. “The government’s ultimate responsibility is to protect and preserve life, so any government system that causes death requires an immediate response—especially when those deaths are justified as serving ‘public safety,’” the authors write.

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Fleeing Bronx drug suspect dies when cop knocks him off scooter with cooler; sergeant suspended by NYPD

A scooter-riding suspect fleeing a Bronx buy-and-bust drug sting was killed when an NYPD sergeant smacked him with a cooler grabbed from a local family’s outing, sending the victim tumbling to his death, an eyewitness and police sources said Thursday.

NYPD Sgt. Erik Duran, an NYPD Bronx narcotics veteran who joined the force in 2010, was suspended without pay just hours after the lethal encounter, police said.

An eyewitness, a 25-year local resident, was with relatives when the clash began on Aqueduct Ave. near W. 190th St. about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Kingsbridge Heights.

The 30-year-old suspect, Eric Duprey, “was on the bike, moving north when the cops started chasing him,” said the 42-year-old witness, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Then he took a U-turn and was riding on the sidewalk… The cop then took my cooler, which was filled with soda cans, water bottles, and hit him.”

The victim’s wife Orlyanis Velez said police were providing her with no details of the deadly encounter.

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Kansas Highway Patrol to pay $500,000 after passenger killed in police chase in Topeka

The Kansas Highway Patrol will pay a half million dollars to the family of a woman who died in a 2021 police chase in Topeka. The settlement was approved Wednesday by the State Finance Council. According to the lawsuit, Trooper Justin Dobler was patrolling on March 6, 2021, when he allegedly saw a car with a cracked windshield. It looked similar to a white Ford Crown Victoria that was on a list of stolen vehicles. He attempted to pull the vehicle over, but the driver did not stop and a chase began. About 45 seconds into the pursuit, the lawsuit said Dobler identified the car as a Mercury Grand Marquis. Dobler provided dispatch information including the license plate number and was told a couple minutes later that the vehicle was not stolen. The vehicle allegedly was speeding up to 55 mph in a 35 mph zone. He twice attempted a “tactical vehicle intervention” to disable the car. The third attempt was successful and the car spun out and struck a utility pole. Passenger Anita Benz, 45, was killed. Her daughter filed a federal lawsuit in March. The lawsuit said the highway patrol found Dobler had violated the agency’s chase policy.

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Cops Use Phony Diagnoses To Explain Away Stun Gun Deaths

A small change in wording by medical examiners could have a big impact on how deaths in police custody are reported. In March, the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) said “excited delirium” should not be cited as a cause of death.

“Instead,” the organization said, “NAME endorses that the underlying cause, natural or unnatural (to include trauma), for the delirious state be determined (if possible) and used for death certification.” While that guidance is not legally binding, it further undermines the concept of excited delirium, which proponents describe as a state of wild agitation or distress, often resulting from illicit drug use, that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest. NAME now joins the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in not recognizing excited delirium as a cause of death.

The controversial term was popularized in the 1980s by a Miami forensic pathologist who was study sudden deaths of cocaine users, most of them in police custody. Nearly all “excited delirium” victims die after being tased or physically restrained by police. Since 2000, a 2017 Reuters investigation found, excited delirium had been linked to at least 276 deaths following the use of a stun gun, which suggested that electrocution, not excitement or agitation, was largely responsible.

The diagnosis has been used in other scenarios to clear police or other state actors. In 2019, three Aurora, Colorado, police officers accosted 23-year-old Elijah McClain as he was walking home from a convenience store and violently restrained him. McClain died after two paramedics diagnosed him with excited delirium and forcibly injected him with an overdose of ketamine, a powerful sedative. From January 2019 through September 2020, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office found, Aurora paramedics injected people with ketamine 22 times in response to what they perceived as excited delirium.

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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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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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