The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[jimmy olsen]

If true, charge them with manslaughter.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rough-ride-lawyer-says-man-fatally-injured-custody-baltimore-police-n347391

Rough Ride? Lawyer Says Man Fatally Injured in Custody of Baltimore Police Lacked Seat Belt

BALTIMORE — No video captured what happened to Freddie Gray inside the police van where officers heaved him into a metal compartment after pinning him to a sidewalk. The cause of his fatal spine injury has not been revealed.

But a troubling detail emerged as hundreds of protesters converged on City Hall again Thursday: He was not only handcuffed and put in leg irons, but left without a seat belt during his trip to the station, a police union's lawyer said.

Unbelted detainees have been paralyzed and even killed by rough rides in what used to be called "paddy wagons." It even has a name: "nickel rides," referring to cheap amusement park thrills.

Police brutality against prisoners being transported was addressed just six months ago in a plan released by Baltimore officials to reduce this misconduct. Department rules updated nine days before Gray's arrest clearly state that all detainees shall be strapped in by seat belts or "other authorized restraining devices" for their own safety after arrest.

Gray was not belted in, said attorney Michael Davey, who represents at least one of the officers under investigation.

But he took issue with the rules.

"Policy is policy, practice is something else," particularly if a prisoner is combative, Davey told The Associated Press. "It is not always possible or safe for officers to enter the rear of those transport vans that are very small, and this one was very small."

Assistant Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said Gray was secured by "leg irons" after he became agitated during the trip, but the department hasn't said whether he was buckled in with a seat belt.

The Gray family's lawyer, Billy Murphy, said "his spine was 80 percent severed" while in custody. It's not clear whether he was injured by officers in the street or while being carried alone in the van's compartment.

But if it happened on the way to the station, it wouldn't be the first such injury in Baltimore: Dondi Johnson died of a fractured spine in 2005 after he was arrested for urinating in public and transported without a seat belt, with his hands cuffed behind his back.

"We argued they gave him what we call a 'rough ride,'" at high speed with hard cornering, said Attorney Kerry D. Staton. "He was thrown from one seat into the opposite wall, and that's how he broke his neck."

Staton obtained a $7.4 million judgment for the family, later reduced to the legal cap of $200,000.

It also has happened in Philadelphia, where police in 2001 barred transportation of prisoners without padding or belts after The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the city had paid $2.3 million to settle lawsuits over intentionally rough rides, which permanently paralyzed two people.

Gray fled on foot and was captured on April 12 after an officer "made eye contact" with him outside a public housing complex, police said. Videos show Gray screaming on the ground before being dragged, his legs limp, into a van. Witnesses said he was crying out in pain.

Kevin Moore, a friend of Freddie Gray's who recorded video of his arrest, told The Baltimore Sun that police had Gray's legs bent "like he was a crab or a piece of origami."

[Admiral Yi]

Anarchy in Baltimore.  7 cops injured, one unconscious.  Cop cars being pelted with rocks and bottles.  Stores being looted.  Schools closed down, universities closed down.  Hundred of cops being called in from other jurisdictions.

[Ed Anger]

I'VE GOT A MASSIVE BONER

[Razgovory]

Seedy is probably out lighting up the town.

[jimmy olsen]

Seedy is probably out lighting up the town.

Looks like someone's lighting up some cop cars and buildings.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stones-hurled-cops-after-gray-funeral-gangs-unite-target-cops-n349186

[lustindarkness]

Man I wish Seedy was here to give us his opinion on this.

[dps]

Man I wish Seedy was here to give us his opinion on this.

Just guessing, but I'd say he'd come out against cop killing.     

[sbr]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore/391158/

The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore

Years of abuses are every bit as egregious as what the Department of Justice documented in Ferguson, Missouri, and as deserving of a national response.

In Baltimore, where 25-year-old Freddie Gray died shortly after being taken into police custody, an investigation may uncover homicidal misconduct by law enforcement, as happened in the North Charleston, South Carolina, killing of Walter Scott. Or the facts may confound the darkest suspicions of protestors, as when the Department of Justice released its report on the killing of Michael Brown.

What's crucial to understand, as Baltimore residents take to the streets in long-simmering frustration, is that their general grievances are valid regardless of how this case plays out. For as in Ferguson, where residents suffered through years of misconduct so egregious that most Americans could scarcely conceive of what was going on, the people of Baltimore are policed by an entity that perpetrates stunning abuses. The difference is that this time we needn't wait for a DOJ report to tell us so. Harrowing evidence has been presented. Yet America hasn't looked.   

I include myself. 

Despite actively reading and commenting on police misconduct for many years, I was unaware until yesterday that the Baltimore Sun published a searing 2014 article documenting recent abuses that are national scandals in their own rights.

A grandmother's bones were broken. A pregnant woman was violently thrown to the ground. Millions of dollars were paid out to numerous victims of police brutality.

And almost none of us noticed!

So I join all who say that protests in Baltimore should remain peaceful, and I will continue to withhold judgment about Gray's death until more facts are known.

But I also insist that Baltimore protests are appropriate regardless of what happened to Freddie Gray, as is more federal scrutiny and intervention. Although much was rightly made of Ferguson's racially unrepresentative local leadership, the presence of a black mayor and a diverse city council has not solved Baltimore's police problem, partly because the DOJ responded to revelations of epidemic brutality with less than the full-scale civil rights probe that some residents requested and because Maryland pols have thwarted reform bills urged by city leaders.

There are so many good reasons for locals to be outraged.

The Baltimore Sun's article shows why in detail. And a few choice excerpts are the best beginning in this attempt to contextualize the ongoing protests within recent history.

Let's start with the money.

$5.7 million is the amount the city paid to victims of brutality between 2011 and 2014. And as huge as that figure is, the more staggering number in the article is this one: "Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil-rights violations." What tiny percentage of the unjustly beaten win formal legal judgments?

If you're imagining that they were all men in their twenties, think again:

Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.
The 87-year-old grandmother was named Venus Green. A former teacher with two college degrees, she spent her retirement years as a foster parent for needy children. She was on her porch one day when her grandson ran up crying for an ambulance.

He'd been shot.

The article goes on to tell her story from a legal document in her successful lawsuit:

Paramedics and police responded to the emergency call, but the white officer became hostile. "What happened? Who shot you?" Green recalled the officer saying to her grandson, according to an 11-page letter in which she detailed the incident for her lawyer. Excerpts from the letter were included in her lawsuit. "You're lying. You know you were shot inside that house. We ain't going to help you because you are lying."

"Mister, he isn't lying," replied Green, who had no criminal record. "He came from down that way running, calling me to call the ambulance."

The officer, who is not identified in the lawsuit, wanted to go into the basement, but Green demanded a warrant. Her grandson kept two dogs downstairs and she feared they would attack. The officer unhooked the lock, but Green latched it. He shoved Green against the wall.

She hit the wooden floor. "Bitch, you ain't no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up," Green recalled the officer saying as he stood over her. "He pulled me up, pushed me in the dining room over the couch, put his knees in my back, twisted my arms and wrist and put handcuffs on my hands and threw me face down on the couch."

After pulling Green to her feet, the officer told her she was under arrest. Green complained of pain. "My neck and shoulder are hurting," Green told him. "Please take these handcuffs off." An African-American officer then walked in the house, saw her sobbing and asked that the handcuffs be removed since Green wasn't violent. The cuffs came off, and Green didn't face any charges. But a broken shoulder tormented her for months.
When pondering the fact that Baltimore paid out $5.7 million in brutality settlements over four years, consider that the payout in this case was just $95,000. (For the story of the pregnant woman and many others, the full article is here.)

Lest anyone imagine that this investigation was the only tipoff of egregious misconduct among Baltimore police, more context is useful. The period covered in the brutality investigation came immediately after the FBI caught 51 Baltimore police officers in a scheme that resulted in at least 12 extortion convictions.

Shortly after the investigation was published this happened on a Baltimore street:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDTbSmF76N8


This year a detective who retired from the police force last year demonstrated a violent streak—he allegedly took part in a motorcycle-club brawl that left a man hospitalized. Also in 2014, "a city police officer was charged with felony assault after he stormed into a home in full uniform Monday and threatened to kill his wife with his service weapon." And Baltimore police tased a hospitalized meningitis patient 5 times in the course of ten minutes. He died soon after. Prosecutors did not file charges.

Another cop was charged with an assault on a 14-year-old boy.

Even animals couldn't escape the brutality of the Baltimore police last year. In July, "Officer Thomas Schmidt, a 24-year veteran assigned to the Emergency Services unit, was placed on paid administrative leave after police say he held down a Shar-Pei while a fellow officer, Jeffrey Bolger, slit the dog's throat." A month later, a Baltimore police officer plead guilty "to a felony animal cruelty charge after he fatally beat and choked his girlfriend's Jack Russell terrier," an August 5 article noted. The very same year, even one of Baltimore's good cops couldn't escape the horror show of dead animals: "Four investigators from agencies outside Baltimore are working to determine who left a dead rat on the car windshield of an officer who was cooperating with prosecutors on a police brutality case."

What about the prior year?

There was a murder-suicide, with a policeman killing a firefighter, his girlfriend, and himself. There was a different officer who killed himself in jail after being charged with killing his fiancée. In yet another case, "Abdul Salaam, 36, says he was beaten in July 2013 after a traffic stop by officers Nicholas Chapman and Jorge Bernardez-Ruiz and that he never got a response to his complaint filed with internal affairs," The Sun reported. "Those officers would be implicated less than three weeks later in the death of 44-year-old Tyrone West while he was in police custody." Also in 2013, a jury acquitted an off-duty police officer on manslaughter charges after he chased down and killed a 17-year-old boy who may or may not have thrown a rock that thumped harmlessly into his front door. And that's not even getting into serious corruption that wasn't brutality.

I could go on, but I've long since started to skim past stories like "Baltimore police officer pimps out his own wife" and thinking, meh, I've seen worse from cops there. The cop who shot himself and lied about it to get worker's comp benefits? Meh, at least he didn't shoot someone else and then lie about what happened. There is just a staggering level of dysfunction in the department, and residents of Baltimore, a city that could use a professional crime-fighting force if ever there was one, have suffered under it year after year after year. Pick one. (Take 2008! A Baltimore cop shot a man twice in the back. He was acquitted, too.)

There is so much I haven't included (example), and I've just trawled through the archives of The Baltimore Sun for a two-year period. They cover most police-involved deaths, but no newspaper covers more than a minuscule subset of use-of-force incidents.

So no wonder protestors are out in Baltimore after this latest death.

No wonder that a meeting on police brutality this week had to be moved to a bigger venue because so many Baltimore residents are concerned enough to come out in person. "Dozens of residents—most of them black—inundated federal officials with their assertions that city police have been brutalizing residents with impunity," a just-published Baltimore Sun article reports. It includes a quote from a 35-year-old who asked the feds, "When are you all going to help us?"

Lots of links in the original article.

[Alcibiades]

Looting and burning continuing it seems.  Malls being looted, liquor stores of course, and the "rioters" are cutting fire-hoses so that the fire department can't put out the fires.  Oh yeah, and attacking all firefighters and white people in sight as well.

[Alcibiades]

Found seedy : https://twitter.com/shomaristone/status/592872463610073088

[Razgovory]

Found seedy : https://twitter.com/shomaristone/status/592872463610073088

Okay, that is pretty fucking cool.

[Eddie Teach]

Been busy working on his tan, I see.

[Syt]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/27/baltimore-police-protesters-violence-freddie-gray

Baltimore protests turn into riots as mayor declares state of emergency

Troops from the US national guard began rolling into Baltimore in armoured vehicles after violent clashes, looting and fires led city authorities to declare a week-long curfew banning people from the streets at night.

At least 27 people were arrested after intense rioting broke out following the funeral service for Freddie Gray, a young black man who died last week of injuries sustained after his arrest. Fifteen police officers were injured in Monday night's unrest, six of them seriously, according to chiefs.

Young people began hurling bricks and bottles at police in riot gear soon after Gray was buried in the afternoon. Shops in the Mondawmin mall were looted and police cars were set on fire and smashed – one while an officer remained seated inside.

"This is not protesting, this is not your first amendment rights, this is just criminal activity," said police commissioner Anthony Batts, declaring he was "supremely disappointed in what's happened in our beautiful city".

Repeatedly condemning the rioters as "thugs", Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said a city-wide curfew between 10pm and 5am would be imposed for a week beginning on Tuesday night.

As the chaotic scenes unfolded there was an appeal for calm from Gray's family. "I think the violence is wrong," his twin sister, Fredericka, said late on Monday.

Gray, 25, died in hospital on 19 April, a week after he sustained a broken neck and lapsed into a coma. He had been arrested a week earlier, having been chased by officers for "catching the eye" of a lieutenant and running away. A knife was found in his pocket. Six officers have been suspended and a criminal inquiry into Gray's death is under way.

His funeral on Monday was followed by violent scenes. Crowds were shot at by police using teargas grenades, so-called "less lethal" bullets and pepper balls, which explode to release an irritant.

Passersby and reporters were among those struck. At least one officer was seen throwing a brick back at protesters.

Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland declared a state of emergency, activating the state's 5,000 national guard personnel with an executive order declaring the need "to protect the lives and property of citizens". Batts said the troops would protect buildings. President Barack Obama was briefed on the crisis in Washington by Loretta Lynch, his new attorney general.

As night fell several fires burned across the city. In one instance firefighters trying to extinguish a blaze at a pharmacy were set back by a rioter with a knife who slashed a hose connected to a hydrant.

In east Baltimore flames engulfed a construction project due to become a 60-unit building to house low-income elderly people. City authorities said it was unclear whether the fire was linked to the riots.

Baltimore's authorities announced that the public school system would be closed on Tuesday, leaving more than 80,000 students without classes to attend amid an atmosphere of seething discontentment with police and the city administration.

Struggling to keep up with events, Mayor Rawlings-Blake said at her own press conference: "I am at a loss for words ... It is idiotic to think that by destroying your city you're going to make life better for anybody."

Police had put the city on alert earlier on Monday after claiming to have intelligence of a violent threat. Batts explained late in the evening police understood the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerilla Family gangs had met and each pledged to kill a police officer.

However the unrest appeared instead to have been sparked by a younger crowd of high school students left milling around the neighborhood near the site of Gray's funeral by the cancellation of public transport.

"They thought it was cute to throw cinder blocks at police," said Batts.

The rioting on Monday night followed scattered vandalism and looting after peaceful protests on Saturday.

Gray's case is the latest flashpoint for demonstrators who accuse American police of killing young black men without justification. Cellphone video footage showed him being dragged into the police van while yelling in pain. One of his legs appeared limp. However police have indicated his neck was broken after this point, while declining to provide details.

Police chiefs admitted officers failed to provide Gray with medical attention despite his requests and failed to seatbelt him in the van. Past prisoners in Baltimore have described "rough rides" in which police vehicles are seemingly deliberately driven erratically to injure passengers.

Gray travelled with his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs in restraints. A second man was collected by the van during the journey. The man, whose name has not been released, is said to have given police an account of what he saw inside the vehicle.

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful, said in a tweet she was "praying for peace and safety" for all in Baltimore. Clinton described Gray's death as "a tragedy that demands answers".

[derspiess]

 

Looting and burning continuing it seems.  Malls being looted, liquor stores of course, and the "rioters" are cutting fire-hoses so that the fire department can't put out the fires.  Oh yeah, and attacking all firefighters and white people in sight as well.

Lovely.

[Jaron]

Remind me why the 13th amendment was a good thing again?