Tag: police shootings

16-Year-Old Dutch Protester Shot at by Police Under Investigation For Manslaughter

The 16-year-old demonstrator who was shot at by police during a farmers protest in the Netherlands says he is under investigation for manslaughter.

The incident occurred on Tuesday night in the northern town of Heerenveen when Jouke Hospes had live rounds fired at his tractor during the protest.

Authorities immediately claimed that Hospes had deliberately tried to drive his vehicle into officers, but video footage of the confrontation shows this did not happen.

Hospes described how the incident began, saying farmers were already starting to leave the area when they were confronted by armed police.

“Behind me, it was clear, so I decided to go around it. I calmly crossed the sidewalk and drove very calmly. I went to see if traffic was approaching and if I could cross the road. I was driving [slowly], and suddenly I heard a PANG in my right ear. I thought there soon would be a second one.”

“I didn’t have any damage, so I thought it was a rubber bullet… However, I stopped for a while at Oudehaske, and when I was walking around the tractor, I saw a hole in the iron. All kinds of thoughts went through my head.”

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Rogue Cops: The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone

“No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.

In Egbert v. Boule, the Court gave total immunity to Border Patrol agents who beat up a bed-and-breakfast owner, in the process carving out a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment for border police (and by extension, other federal police) who unconstitutionally use excessive force. As journalist Ian Millhiser concludes, “Egbert v. Boule is a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.”

In Cope v. Cogdill, the Court let stand a Fifth Circuit ruling that granted qualified immunity to jail officials who watched a suicidal inmate strangle himself without intervening or calling for help. Likewise, in Ramirez v. Guadarrama, the Court let stand a lower court ruling granting qualified immunity to police officers who fired their tasers at a suicidal man who had doused himself in gasoline, causing the man to burst into flames.

Both Cope and Ramirez move the goal posts for the kind of misconduct that merits qualified immunity, suggesting that even sheer incompetence is excusable when it involves a cop.

It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

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Cops Dump Over 90 Rounds Into Fleeing Man Over Stop for ‘Traffic Equipment Violation’

Before he was filled with taxpayer funded bullets on Monday, Jayland Walker, 25, was a standout wrestler at Buchtel High School, where he graduated in 2015. According to his family he worked for Amazon then took a job driving for DoorDash and was set to get married. All of this is over now, however, after multiple officers decided to dump more than a dozen rounds each into Walkers body after he fled a traffic stop for a simple violation.

Walker’s family says their son was engaged to his fiancé, Jaymeisha Beasley, who was tragically struck by a hit and run driver last month who has yet to be found. The families of the couple are now jointly grieving their tragic losses, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.

According to Bobby DiCello, the lead attorney for the Walker family, prior to fleeing the traffic stop on Monday night, Walker had no criminal record.

“Jayland, not one time in his life, and you can search this city, this state and this country— never offended or bothered a soul. And how these events took place leaves us with many, many questions,” said DiCello at a press conference on Thursday. “Our job, by doing this press conference, is to remind the police department for the city of Akron that we are here for accountability.”

According to police, an officer attempted to pull over Walker around 12:30 a.m. on Monday for a “traffic equipment violation” but for some reason he refused to stop. A chase ensued and would last four and a half minutes. Video from traffic cameras show that in this short time, the single cruiser following Walker multiplied into a whopping 10 cruisers.

Police would claim that Walker fired a gun from his vehicle during the pursuit. Captain Dave Laughlin, of the Akron Police Department, told the press that officers didn’t see a weapon but heard a gunshot or multiple gunshots from the car on the entrance ramp of Route 8.

Police claim Walker then came to a stop before exiting the vehicle and fleeing on foot. That’s when he was surrounded by cops and executed.

“Actions by the suspect caused the officers to perceive he posed a deadly threat to them. In response to this threat, officers discharged their firearms, striking the suspect,” the police statement said.

Police claim to have found a gun in Walker’s vehicle but have made no mention as to whether or not he was armed when 8 officers all began shooting him like a firing squad. According to photos obtained by the attorneys, after Walker was filled with holes, police then handcuffed his dead body and waited for the medical examiner to arrive to pronounce him deceased.

“We know that no police officer ever wants to discharge their service weapon in the line of duty,” the mayor and chief said in a joint statement. “And anytime they must, it’s a dark day for our city, for the families of those involved, as well as for the officers.”

Clearly, however, this was not the case. Officer who don’t want to fire their weapons won’t dump 90 rounds into a person who was likely unarmed.

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Woman Tells Cops She Can’t Get on the Ground Because She’s Pregnant, Cops Put 5 Rounds In Her

When a mother of three was travelling through Kansas City, Missouri last week, pulling off the highway to get her children some ice cream, she never imagined that she and her children would witness police shoot an unarmed pregnant woman. Unfortunately, however, that’s exactly what happened according to Shé Danja.

Shé Danja, who declined to give her last name out of fear of police retaliation, pulled out her phone and recorded the incident as it unfolded and the video appears to show that 26-year-old Leonna Hale was unarmed when she was shot 5 times by Kansas City police officers.

Immediately after they shot her, police claimed that a “gun was recovered at the scene.” However, Hale did not appear to be holding it and according to the eye witness, Hale told police there was a gun in the vehicle which was far away from Hale when she was shot.

The incident unfolded on Friday May 27 when police say they were looking for a carjacking suspect. According to police, they found a vehicle matching the description of the stolen vehicle located at the Family Dollar on 6th street.

When police approached the vehicle, the male driver exited the car and took off running while Hale stayed back. Hale then complied with police and got out of the car like she was asked to do.

According to the Kansas City Star, who interviewed Shé Danja, “The cops told the woman to get on the ground, but the woman informed them that she was pregnant, and so she couldn’t get down on the ground.” Then police asked her to get down multiple times, which she still couldn’t. The woman then informed police that there was a gun in the vehicle.

The woman began moving back toward a fence of the parking lot. Numerous officers approached and drew their weapons. “She did not pull out a weapon on them,” Shé Danja said. “She did not even have a stick in her hand.” The woman ran three steps away from officers, Shé Danja said, and police shot five times.

“One, two, three, four, five. I remember it because it didn’t stop. They shot five times,” Shé Danja told the Star. “I remember seeing her hit the ground and I froze,” she said. She also asked police numerous times why they shot the woman, but officers refused to answer.

Shé Danja was then forced away from the scene by one of the responding officers, despite telling him that her son was still in the store.

As the video shows, Hale is seen lying on the ground as the blood starts to leak through her shirt. Instead of medical aid, police move in to handcuff her. According to police, she was eventually taken to the hospital with life threatening injuries and remains in critical but stable condition. The condition of her unborn child is unknown.

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I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired.

Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.

About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.

But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.

This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell. 

I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000.

In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.

This concerned me. I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false. 

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones. 

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AL JAZEERA ACCUSES ISRAEL OF “BLATANT MURDER” AFTER ITS STAR REPORTER SHOT DEAD IN WEST BANK RAID

The media outlet Al Jazeera accused Israeli forces of “deliberately targeting and killing our colleague” on Wednesday after Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the face while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

In a statement, the Al Jazeera Media Network said that Abu Akleh—who worked as the publication’s Palestine correspondent—was wearing a press jacket that clearly identified her as a journalist when Israeli forces shot her “with live fire.”

Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, called the attack “a blatant murder,” saying Abu Akleh, 51, was “assassinated in cold blood.”

The statement continued:

Al Jazeera Media Network condemns this heinous crime, which intends to only prevent the media from conducting their duty. Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen. It also calls on the international community to condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable for their intentional targeting and killing of Shireen.

The Israeli authorities are also responsible for the targeting of Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samudi, who was also shot in the back while covering the same event, and he is currently undergoing treatment.

Al Jazeera extends its sincere condolences to the family of Shireen in Palestine, and to her extended family around the world, and we pledge to prosecute the perpetrators legally, no matter how hard they try to cover up their crime, and bring them to justice.

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