Family Calls for Justice After Cops Shoot and Kill Their 6-Year-old Little Boy

The family of 6-year-old Kameron Prescott killed by police this week is demanding answers from the cops who killed him and want them to be held accountable.

US Cops Have Killed Over 1,000 in 2017—Including Pregnant Moms, Innocent Kids, & Disabled People

The number of Americans killed by police in 2017 has surpassed 1,000, and the victims include innocent teenagers, pregnant women, and mentally ill men.

Graphic Dashcam: Cop Shoots Fleeing, Unarmed Man in Back, Fires Again After He Falls

Three years after a Knoxville police officer shot an unarmed man in the back six times and killed him, an appellate court has determined that the officer is not eligible for qualified immunity in the $3 million civil rights lawsuit he is facing.

The incident occurred during a stop on the side of the road when Officer David Gerlach encountered Ronald E. Carden, a 45-year-old man who was recently released on parole. It ended with Gerlach shooting Carden multiple times in the back, and then proceeding to shoot him as he was falling to the ground. The horrific incident now serves to illustrate that not only did police lie about what happened, they covered it up, and refused to bring charges against an officer who should have likely been charged with homicide.

Carden’s son, Brandon, is suing Gerlach and the Knoxville Police Department for $3 million in a federal civil rights lawsuit. He recently won a small victory in court when an appellate judge refused to grant qualified immunity to Gerlach. The court ruled that not only did case law not sustain that the shooting was justified, but they denied Gerlach’s claim of immunity from prosecution. The court wrote:

“Because it was clearly established at the time of the shooting that the police may not fire on a fleeing suspect who does not pose a threat of serious physical harm, the denial of qualified immunity was proper.”

In other words, while police officers are normally protected from prosecution because of qualified immunity statutes, when a suspect is running away, a police officer may not shoot and kill such a person. One might be tempted to believe such a conclusion would fall in the realm of common sense, but not when it comes to police, as The Free Thought Project has reported.

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The incident occurred along the side of Knoxville’s Interstate 40 at about 3 a.m. on July 27, 2014, when the car Carden was driving got a flat tire. From Gerlach’s dashcam footage, two men (Carden and a friend) can be seen attempting to change the flat tire on the car. Some police officers may have attempted to help the two men, but Gerlach ran Carden’s plates which reportedly came back registered to a different vehicle.

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Thinking the car might be stolen, Gerlach began questioning Carden. As soon as Gerlach reached for Carden’s arm, Carden punched him and began running away, out of camera view. A taser can be heard as having been deployed, and then six shots were fired.

Gerlach radioed “shots fired” and backup officers arrived, and Carden’s friend—who had stayed out of the encounter, even as he watched the shooting—was placed in handcuffs. The story that followed was anything but the truth.

KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk reportedly described such a violent struggle for Gerlach’s gun that the holster broke under the force. “Officer Gerlach was able to retain enough control of the gun to fire more than one shot,” DeBusk said.

What DeBusk failed to mention, which the autopsy confirmed, was that Gerlach shot Carden in the back six times, with five bullets being fired from a distance of more than three feet. Not only was Carden fleeing, but Gerlach shot him after he had fallen to the ground, according to the autopsy report.

Carden’s son filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gerlach, and the KPD for its officer’s use of deadly force against his father. Gerlach’s attorneys contended he should be given immunity from prosecution on the basis that he was acting within his official duties as a police officer at the time of the shooting. The judge overseeing the case completely disagreed.

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Proof Gerlach shot both a fleeing man, and killed a wounded man comes from the pen of the judge overseeing the appeal. The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Sixth District U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Tom Varlan cited the autopsy report as well as evidence presented by Carden’s attorneys. Varlan wrote:

“(Carden) started to flee, and made it about one step, when (Gerlach) began shooting at (Carden)…(Gerlach) fired approximately two to three shots at (Carden) while (Gerlach) was still lying on the ground. He then stood up and fired three more shots down at (Carden). Approximately thirty-five seconds elapsed from the moment (Carden) struck (Gerlach) to the moment (Gerlach) fired his final round.”

The Sentinel also noted that while the dash cam footage showed Carden wearing jeans and a buttoned-up shirt when he ran from Gerlach, his body arrived at the morgue shirtless and in handcuffs. The shirt was not turned over until three weeks after the shooting, and it was “still buttoned but turned inside out,” with “no evidence Carden was wearing the shirt when he was struck by bullets.“

For those who might assume that Gerlach had probable cause to shoot Carden, the court opined:

“[Even if Gerlach] had probable cause to fear for his safety during his struggle with Carden [a jury could find] he lacked the same cause after the struggle had ended and Carden, still unarmed, had turned and begun to flee.”

Police officers and departments everywhere should take notice that it is still unlawful to shoot at fleeing suspects who pose no serious threat to police.

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According to a report from the Knoxville Mercury, which conducted an extensive review of the disciplinary procedures inside the KPD, the problem is systemic.

“Although more than 100 officers have been flagged in the 14 years since an early intervention system was instituted to nip problem behaviors in the bud, only one of those officers has actually been enrolled in the correctional part of the program. In all other cases, supervisors decided the officers’ activities weren’t a problem.”

Equally disturbing is the fact that the police department investigates itself when officers are accused of serious infractions.

“The Mercury examined the personnel files of more than 20 officers who have either recently been the subject of lawsuits related to use of force, had repeated misbehavior problems or high-profile errors, or who have been flagged for recurring problems by the department itself. In these officers’ cases, reprimands, “counseling forms,” and even suspensions often appear to have had little to no effect on officers’ annual reviews, pay raises, or promotions. The department itself investigates potential criminal allegations against its officers, even in cases that involve deadly use of force or shooting deaths.”

Had there been an independent review board, operating outside of the influence of the police department, and an effective discipline program at work within the KPD, then maybe this shooting could have been prevented.

As Carden’s son moves forward in his civil rights lawsuit, it is important to remember that even if he does win the $3 million he is pursuing, Tennessee taxpayers will be the ones footing the bill, not the killer cop.

You Are 47 Times More Likely to be Killed by a Cop than by an Islamic Terrorist

(Food for Thinkers Blog) – You are 47 times more likely to be killed by a cop than by an Islamic terrorist. This was the ratio in America as of June 7, 2017. Between January 1 and June 7 of this year, 11 Americans were killed by people classified here as Islamic terrorists whereas 520 were killed by cops.

These 11 people died in four one-man attacks. Out of perhaps 4 million Muslims in America, 4 have murdered in the name of Islam this year. Yet the entire nation is on edge about the threat of Islamic terrorism, while at the same time not putting 2 and 2 together about the much greater threat posed by law enforcement.

When cops properly apprehend violent criminals, I am the first guy to salute them. And when they direct traffic at sporting events and around accident scenes, I am the first guy to thank them.

Washington, DC 1958

However, just because some cops do good things doesn’t mean they should be supported unconditionally and never ever questioned. When they commit crimes, which happens far more frequently than many people are willing to admit, they need to be held personally and financially accountable just like any other criminals. Google “police brutality” or “police misconduct”. Enter the same terms into YouTube. The list of examples is endless.

And to dismiss the sources as “left-wing” totally evades the point. The true paradigm in politics is not left-right, liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican, Hillary-Trump, etc. Rather, it is the state versus the individual.

William Norman Grigg, who left this earth WAY too soon, was the premier chronicler of police abuse in America. You can read his blog here. In 2009, Grigg formulated something called the “Tom Joad test” to determine one’s true political worldview. Tom Joad is the character from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath who stated, “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”

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Grigg spells out the Tom Joad test as follows:

“When you see a cop — or, more likely, several of them — beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?

“If it’s the former, you’re an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.

“If it’s the latter, you’re an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.

“It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn’t invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject’s default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.

“Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual — any individual — is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?”

Did some of the 520 people killed by cops between January 1 and June 7 of this year pose an imminent danger to the cops? Most probably. Are cops always wrong? NO! 

Cops aren’t always right either. To blithely assume that these 520 people as well as the several thousand other victims of police misconduct and abuse “had to have done something to deserve it”, or to automatically take the word of the police and to go about your day, is to tell the world that you simply don’t understand the rights of individuals when they come nose-to-nose with the state.

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The “47 times” statistic really ought to rattle your cage. And between May 1, 2013 and June 11, 2017, 4804 Americans were killed by cops. That is over 60 percent more people than perished in the 9/11 attacks. And this doesn’t even take into account the number of Americans killed by cops between September 11, 2001 and May 1, 2013!

Law-and-order conservatives may insist they hate the government when it comes to the IRS, Obamacare and the school system. However, they are quite willing to overlook the protections for the accused as enshrined in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. They are six-pack-ab constitutionalists except when they are more than happy to use the Constitution as toilet paper. They seethe with contempt for the government except when they are on their knees worshipping the government.

The cops are the government. And they are the most dangerous part of the government. They are the business end of the government. In any totalitarian regime, it is not the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots or Kims who do the dirty work. But rather the cops, as well as the other armed, badged and uniformed gods of the law-and-order right: military personnel.

If Hillary had prevailed in the election of 2016 and, as many feared, America undergone widespread gun confiscation, it would not have been Hillary, or Chuck Schumer, or Dianne Feinstein on your doorstep demanding your guns. It would have been the police and the military. Would the law-and-order right still be kissing the derierres of those in uniform?

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To be sure, cops have a risky job that puts them on the front lines against some of the true dregs of humanity. But people in numerous other professions have far riskier jobs. On-the-job police fatalities are at some of the lowest levels they have been in decades. And only about half of these fatalities were homicides. There is no “war on cops.”

To go from “they have a tough job” to unconditionally siding with the police absolutely every time is not just stupid, it is downright dangerous.

I started writing this essay on June 7. I finished writing it on June 11. Since then, 14 more people have been killed by police. The ratio is now over 48:1.

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IMPORTANT: William Grigg died on April 12 of this year at age 54. He left behind him a widow with significant health issues as well as six children. If you feel so led, please donate to help with the family’s absolutely daunting financial challenges. Every dollar will no doubt be greatly appreciated.

This article was written by Doug Newman on the Food for Thinkers Blog, where it first appeared. It has been republished on the Free Thought Project with his permission.

283 People Have Already Been Killed by Police this Year, Setting Record Pace

There are detailed mortality statistics, maintained by the government, on just about every cause of death of Americans, with the exception of one category; death by cop. Perusing through the FBI’s database, there’s even a category called  “Law Enforcement Officers Killed In The Line Of Duty.” However, as The Free Thought Project has previously reported, there are still no statistics on the number of citizens killed by police officers.

There exists, however, a citizen-run database which estimates the number of people killed by police has exceeded 1,000 per year since 2014. So far, according to Killed By Police’s findings, 2017 will be no different. This year, if the pace of police killings doesn’t change, at least one thousand people will lose their lives in officer-involved shootings.

During the first quarter of 2017 (and it’s not yet over), based upon media reports alone, police officers around the country have killed 283 people, while only 28 police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty. Of those 28, only a few (8) were killed as a direct result of violence.

The number of those killed by police may be much higher, as the Killed By Police website relies on data mining of news stories to compile its statistics, an unreliable method at best. The fact the government does not maintain such an invaluable database serves as fodder for conspiracy theorists, who may conclude the government is trying to cook the books and hide the real numbers.

In October, FBI Director James Comey addressed the lack of transparency. In San Diego, addressing a gathering of police chiefs from around the nation, Comey said Americans believe there’s an “epidemic” of police brutality because “those are the videos they see over and over again,” referring to the internet and news reports. Obviously, relying on video evidence alone is not enough to substantiate the claims an epidemic of police on citizen violence is occurring.

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In the same speech, the FBI director then admitted the truth. “Americans actually have no idea whether the number of black people, brown people, or white people shot by police is up, down, or sideways over the last three years, five years, or 10 years,” Comey acknowledged, “They have no idea whether Black people, or  Brown people, are more likely to be shot during (police) encounters than White people are.” In the end, as TFTP has concluded, no one will ever know unless the government chooses to pass a law requiring all police-involved shootings to be recorded in a national database.

Comey’s comments mirror his concerns from 2015 when he testified before a House oversight committee.

I think it’s embarrassing for those of us in government who care deeply about these issues, especially the use of force by law enforcement, that we can’t have an informed discussion because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the United States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics, and that’s a very bad place to be.

Following the meeting with the chiefs of police, the FBI announced it will begin to collect information and data from police involved shootings and use of force by law enforcement officers. But submitting the data is voluntary on the part of police departments, so it’s unclear just how reliable such a database will ultimately be. Such a volitional requirement is disturbing to civil rights groups. According to one source, “The American Civil Liberties Union has objected that voluntary reporting programs on police-community encounters have failed in the past. The ACLU seeks greater accountability and imposition of financial penalties for failure to produce such data.”

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Will 2017 be the year of greater transparency, higher levels of accountability, and the year the government finally takes the matter serious enough to initiate such a database? These questions and more remain unanswered. In the meanwhile, vigilant citizens will continue to do their part to record those killings when they find them. Unfortunately, the citizen-led database will continue to depend on news stories for its data. But many times, people who are shot and killed by police, have their names withheld until family members can be notified of their death. As a result, it can be presumed, many deaths simply do not get reported in our nation’s press.

Comey might be right. There may not be an epidemic of police killings but until modern policing methods and academies change the way they address their “use of force” policies, the number of humans killed by police will likely rise, as the true statistics remain hidden from public view.

Video Exposes ‘Official’ Account as False, Shows Cop Kill Man as He Ran Away

Nashville, TN — Last Friday, Jocques Scott Clemmons, 31, was pulled over for rolling through a stop sign near his home at Cayce Homes public housing development. Less than 1 minute after the stop begins, however, Clemmons would be shot in the back, dying a painful and slow death.

How exactly did a routine traffic stop turn into a police-involved shooting death? Well, if you listen to the Nashville police department’s original story, Clemmons charged at officer Joshua Lippert, causing a physical confrontation, who then had no choice but to shoot him. However, a video from the nearby housing development, released two days after the killing, tells a different story — a story in which Clemmons was shot as he ran away.

When police released the first video, it appeared to back up their claim of a physical confrontation as it was shot from an angle that made it hard to see what actually transpired. The video shows Clemmons run toward Lippert’s unmarked patrol car and then it ends.

However, the newer video showed that Clemmons never got close to Lippert and instead tried to run around him.

As the new video below shows, no struggle happened until Lippert pursued Clemmons and physically grabbed him. However, the entire time it appears that Clemmons is simply trying to get away as he knows that this meeting will likely end with him locked in a cage.

According to police Clemmons had a gun and was reaching toward his waistband. Lippert said he feared for his life and had no other option but to open fire on Clemmons. Police also claim that Clemmons was holding the gun and refused to drop it. However, if you watch the video below, it appears Clemmons was only trying to get away from Lippert. At no time did Clemmons take aim or point anything in Lippert’s direction.

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As Clemmons ran from him, Lippert opens fire. Clemmons was struck twice in the lower back and once in his left hip, according to police. He later died in surgery.

“He got out of his car, left the door open, started running, police shot him in the back three times, he fell to the ground, a few police officers went over and looked at him, walked away, and that’s about it,” a witness told WKRN.

“As part of the full and accountable investigation into this matter, it is important that the community know of this new development,” Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson said in a statement after the new video was released. “The investigation is active and progressing. We are engaging with the FBI.  Citizens have my assurance that the investigation will be fair, objective and complete.”

Following the release of the new video, the ACLU of Tennessee noted that the shooting “raises serious questions” and they called for a thorough and transparent investigation, according to the Tennessean. 

“The shooting of Jocques Clemmons did not happen in a vacuum,” ACLU-TN executive director Hedy Weinberg said in a statement. “While further investigation will undoubtedly focus on uncovering additional details about what occurred after Officer Joshua Lippert stopped Mr. Clemmons, incidents like these also compel us to take a step back and ask why Mr. Clemmons was stopped in the first place and how officers make decisions about who to stop for minor traffic infractions. Anyone discretionary stop risks a tragic ending if there is an escalation of conflict – far too frequently such escalations result in police use of force, and also expose police to unnecessary risk.”

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Immediately after the shooting, local media, with information from the police, put out a story calling Clemmons ‘a gunman’ — in spite of the fact that Clemmons was not the person who fired the shots. The local media was also given Clemmons’ criminal history by police in an apparent character assassination to justify his death.

Clemmons, who was by no means perfect, does have a criminal history. However, most of his charges are for misdemeanor traffic violations and a drug charge. He also pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of aggravated assault in 2012.

Conveniently left out of the original news story was the fact that Lippert also has a tainted history. Lippert, who was officer of the month in 2014, has also been in trouble with his own department, multiple times.

Lippert, 32, has spent 20 days suspended for various police code violations, including two instances involving physical use of force, according to Metro police records.

As the Tennessean reports, in October 2015, Lippert used physical force to pull a black motorist from the vehicle during a traffic stop, even though the driver said he’d be willing to get out in the presence of a supervisor. Lippert was also reprimanded for having the man’s car towed without giving him a chance to park the car or turn it over to someone else.

In another case, the officer was reprimanded when he “created the necessity to use force against an intoxicated subject” who was being arrested, according to the disciplinary record, according to the Tennessean. That subject was white.

A GoFundMe account has been set up for his funeral which will be held on Feb 18th. As of Friday, the response has shown to be overwhelming and they family has reached their goal.

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Could Clemmons, who left behind two young children, have reacted differently and still be alive? Absolutely. However, does that justify his death?

Sadly, several people took to the comments of Clemmons’ GoFundMe page to let the family know that, ‘yes’, Clemmons running from the officer did justify his death. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit

US Cops Killed 230 Times More People than their British Counterparts in 2016

Police in England killed a total of 5 people in all of 2016. Cops in America killed 230 times more than them, coming in with a total of 1,152 lives taken. If this doesn’t say, ‘hey we have a problem,’ what does?

Already, only four days into 2017, American cops have killed two times as many people as England has in the entire year of 2016.

But America has a much larger population and therefore these numbers don’t matter, right? Wrong.

China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded a single killing by law enforcement officers in 2016.

More people were killed by American police in just the last four days than were killed in 2016 in Germany, England, Spain, Switzerland, and Iceland — combined.

Police killings have gotten so bad that in September, a United Nations expert working group released a scathing report that was debated at the U.N. Human Rights Council. The report noted that police killings of black people in the United States are reminiscent of lynchings and the government must step up to protect them.

In the United States, the overall homicide rate is 5 per 100,000 among the citizens. The rate at which police kill is 30 times that amount.

So why are police in America far deadlier than the rest of the world?

As the Free Thought Project has pointed out time and again, the lack of punishment police receive for brutality and killing seemingly encourages this violent and irresponsible behavior.

Police killings go unpunished because initial investigations are usually conducted by the police department where the alleged perpetrator works, because prosecutors have wide discretion over presenting charges, and because the use of force is not subject to international standards, the experts’ group said, according to Reuters.

Aside from the lack of punishment, the job description of a cop has changed drastically following the onset of the drug war.

The overwhelming majority of police brutality cases stem from the war on drugs. When so many people are tasked with finding and prosecuting those in possession of a substance deemed illegal, the interactions become more frequent and less cordial. If we end that, we get the state out of the private lives of most individuals. This will only serve to lessen the scope of police harassment, in turn lessening the instance of brutality and killings.

We can look at the prohibition of alcohol and the subsequent mafia crime wave that ensued as a result.

Criminal gangs form to protect sales territory and supply lines. They then monopolize the control of the constant demand. Their entire operation is dependent upon police arresting people for drugs. However, the illegality of drug possession and use is what keeps the low-level users and dealers in and out of the court systems.

This revolving door of creating and processing criminals fosters the phenomenon known as Recidivism. Recidivism is a fundamental concept of criminal justice that shows the tendency of those who are processed into the system and the likelihood of future criminal behavior.

The War on Drugs creates criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is setup in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.

The system knows this too.

When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels too. 

Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.

We will see more senseless killings and more innocent lives stripped of opportunity by getting entangled in the system. It is high time we #End the Drug War

The time for peaceful action is now.