Tag: police shootings

Black Lives Matter is Rioting in Philly for Man Who Held a Gun to a Woman’s Head and Was Awaiting Trial For Threatening to Shoot Another

he man who was fatally shot by police after running at them with a knife, sparking violent riots in Philadelphia, previously held a gun to a woman’s head and was awaiting trial for threatening to shoot another.

Walter Wallace Jr., who was fatally shot on Monday, was also a rapper who had songs about shooting the police.

“Guns are a central theme as he rhymes about shooting people, including police,” ABC 6 reports. “Court records show Wallace was currently awaiting trial for allegedly threatening to shoot a woman and her house up.”

It gets worse.

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Unqualified Impunity: When Government Officials Break the Law, They Often Get Away With It

The horrifying video of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, led to a rare occurrence: The police officers responsible are being prosecuted. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with murder and remains in jail, and three other officers are facing lesser charges.

Kentucky’s recent decision not to bring homicide charges against the officers who killed Breonna Taylor is much more typical. Most instances of law enforcement brutality do not result in criminal charges, even when they are captured on video. They often result in no consequences at all. This includes many cases of excessive force in response to the protests after Floyd’s death, but the problem is long standing, and not restricted to local police.

Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa Jr. was not prosecuted or disciplined for shooting and killing a 15-year-old boy, and the Supreme Court ruled last year that the boy’s parents could not sue.

Most of the individuals responsible for the CIA torture program faced no consequences—in fact, one of the CIA employees who oversaw torture and evidence destruction now leads the agency.

And the list goes on.

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No, Joe Biden, Cops Can’t Just Shoot People in the Leg

During ABC’s town hall event with former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate provided a garbled response to a question about criminal justice reform. In particular, he wrongly suggested that when police fire their weapons at suspects, they could shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill.

“You can ban chokeholds, but beyond that you have to teach [the police] how to de-escalate circumstances,” said Biden. “So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.”

This was just one line in a very long, rambling answer to a question about police violence—but it stuck out for its sheer absurdity. The suggestion betrays a total lack of understanding about how guns work.

Note that it was not some slip of the tongue: Biden has previously proposed this exact idea. Contrary to the former veep’s repeated assertions, neither the cops nor anyone else—except perhaps James Bond—could plan to shoot people in the leg as a matter of routine practice. It would take an expert marksman to accomplish that feat consistently. Unless a target is at close range, standing perfectly still, it’s very difficult to hit a specific location on the body. In reality, people are often moving during shootouts, which means that legs and arms can be the hardest part of the body to hit.

“An average suspect can move his hand and forearm across his body to a 90-degree angle in 12/100 of a second,” wrote Bill Lewinksi in a paper for the Force Science Institute. “He can move his hand from his hip to shoulder height in 18/100 of a second. The average officer pulling the trigger as fast as he can on a Glock, one of the fastest- cycling semi-autos, requires 1/4 second to discharge each round.”

If an officer’s life is actually threatened, hitting the suspect in the leg is no guarantee the threat will be neutralized. People who have been hit in the leg or arm are not immediately incapacitated, which is why the police keep firing until a suspect is down. Real life is not like an episode of 24, or a Mission: Impossible movie!

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Cops Mistake Innocent Man for a Suspect, Publicly Execute Him

Stagger’s story was buried in the media and written off after police claimed that he shot at them. CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi initially said officers had returned fire after a suspect shot at them. However, it would later be revealed that cops made that up and Curtis never fired any gun.

It would then take months to get any transparency in the case. Although Curtis was murdered in May, the body camera video was not released publicly until many months later.

According to police, they initially believed Stagger was wanted in connection with the shooting death of 15-year-old Jaylin Ellzey. But he was not. Nevertheless, a heavily militarized police SWAT team descended on the neighborhood. Whether or not they had the right person was apparently of no consequence to the officers.

When police officers found Stagger in his vehicle, they quickly surrounded him and opened fire through the window, killing him. Stagger never even tried to run.

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It Sure Looks Like Daniel Cameron Lied About Breonna Taylor’s Killing

It’s getting harder to deny the likelihood that Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron lied, and lied multiple times, when he explained why a grand jury decided not to charge any police officer with a crime for killing Breonna Taylor. Cameron’s office presented evidence to the jury, but the only criminal charges he announced last week were against Brett Hankison, the Louisville officer who fired blindly into Taylor’s apartment on March 13 and accidentally sprayed ammo into a neighboring unit. The “wanton endangerment” charge he’s facing means that the only officer who will suffer legal consequences for the events surrounding Taylor’s death, at least for now, is the only one who didn’t have a direct hand in killing her. The other officers involved, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, shot Taylor six times out of more than 30 rounds fired between them.

When Cameron announced this decision to the public, he characterized it as a just resolution to a universally accepted set of facts. “The warrant [that the police used to enter the apartment] was not served as a ‘no-knock’ warrant,” he claimed, rebuking witness accounts that officers had failed to announce their presence before bursting into Taylor’s home, causing her boyfriend Kenneth Walker to think they were being burglarized and shoot one of them in the leg. Walker’s bullet was the police’s justification for opening fire, which killed Taylor, who was unarmed. But failing to announce themselves as police would undermine that defense: Under Kentucky’s “castle doctrine,” law-enforcement officers are the only home invaders that residents aren’t allowed to use deadly force against, but only if they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement.

This wasn’t the only dubious claim that Cameron expected the public to take at face value. He also said that the grand jury agreed that Taylor’s death was justified. “While there are six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law,” he explained, “these charges are not applicable to the facts before us because our investigation showed — and the grand jury agreed — that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the return of deadly fire after having been fired upon.” But the grand jury may not have actually agreed.

On Monday, one of the jurors took the extraordinary step of filing a court motion to make transcripts of the grand jury deliberations public and allow its members to speak publicly about how they unfolded, according to the New York Times. Grand jury deliberations are subject to strict secrecy, and the evidence they consider usually only becomes public in court if there’s prosecution. The unnamed juror claimed that Cameron had misrepresented the jury’s case to the public, and that the jurors were never given the option to indict officers Mattingly and Cosgrove. If true, this would appear to undermine Cameron’s claim that the jury was unanimous that Taylor’s death was legally justified.

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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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