While a police officer claimed that a teenager was pointing a gun at him before he opened fire and shot the boy in the back, the body camera footage tells a different story.
The post WATCH: Cop Shoots Fleeing Teenager In The Back Multiple Times, Then Turn Off Body Cams appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Police officers ambushed a man in his family"s backyard and fired several rounds into his back, killing him because they claimed the phone in his hand was a gun.
The post Cops Shoot Unarmed Dad In The Back, Kill Him For Holding a Phone in His Grandparents’ Backyard appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Haywood County, TN — A sheriff’s deputy was reportedly fired after he was charged with domestic assault. But this is not the first time he has had a run-in with the law over domestic assault allegations, and this is not the first department in the county that has fired him as a result.
Adrian Perkins was first arrested in September 2016, while working as a corporal at the Brownsville Police Department. The 29-year-old officer was charged with domestic assault with battery and was immediately placed on administrative leave with pay.
Perkins was released from custody the next morning on $2,500 bond. The Brownsville Police Department released a statement on the incident:
“As soon as Brownsville Police Department became aware of the allegations, Chief Barry Diebold immediately contacted District Attorney Garry Brown and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The Brownsville Police Department takes allegations of domestic violence in the community, especially among its officers, very seriously.”
Perkins was eventually fired from the department, but that did not stop him from pursuing another job in law enforcement. While that is not uncommon for police officers who are fired, Perkins’ case is unique, because he did not leave the state, or even the city—he found another job in the same county.
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The Haywood County Sheriff’s Department claims that Perkins has been employed as a sheriff’s deputy “for a few months,” but he was fired last week after he was arrested once again for domestic assault.
Perkins was arrested for the second time after police reviewed “video from a surveillance camera” outside the New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church in Brownsville, and determined that he was a suspect.
READ MORE: VIDEO: Innocent Man"s Dashcam Exonerates Him After Exposing the Cop as the One Who Broke the Law
While police did not specify as to who the victim was, a family member told WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News, “He is supposed to protect the citizens of Haywood County and he can’t even protect the people in his household.”
Perkins pleaded guilty to the charge of domestic assault and will complete one year of supervised probation as a result. An anonymous family member of the victim told WBBJ 7 that the sentence is not nearly enough.
“He needs to be in jail for a long period of time, not probation, because he [does] not need to be in law enforcement at all, no kind of way,” the family member said.
In a statement, Brownsville Mayor Bill Rawls confirmed that this is the second time Perkins has been fired for domestic violence, but also said that because Perkins filed a grievance lawsuit against the city after the first termination, Rawls was not able to comment on it.
“Officer Perkins was a former Brownsville police department officer. He was terminated Sept. 27, 2016, for a domestic violence charge … It’s just not acceptable in our community. We’re all human beings, we all deserve to be treated with respect, whether we’re in our home or in the streets or in the police department or in the police car or wherever you are.”
As The Free Thought Project has reported, this is not the first time this has happened. In fact, it occurs so often that officers who are fired from one department and then go on to join another—despite existing charges that should interfere with their employment—are referred to as “Gypsy Cops.”
READ MORE: Man Illustrates the Need to Film Police, Catches the "Cop From Hell" on a Hidden Camera
In one case, a police officer in Texas was responsible for three officer-involved shootings in two different departments, all in one year. Chase Welch was first suspended three times in two years for questionable cases that showed he was aggressive and displayed poor judgment. He then shot and killed two men in two separate incidents, and after leaving the department, he went to work as a sheriff’s deputy where he shot a man during his second day on the job.
In another case, a police officer in Ohio got his job back after he participated in the execution of an unarmed couple over a traffic violation. And in yet another case, a police officer in Florida killed a pedestrian with his squad car, punched a child, and spat on a mentally ill man—all in a 3-month time period—and he still has a job as a police officer.
While Adrian Perkins was fired from the Haywood County Sheriff’s Department, it remains to be seen whether the multiple domestic violence charges on his record, along with the extremely light sentence, will stop him from continuing to be a textbook “Gypsy Cop” and going on to work at another police department.
San Antonio, TX — A Bexar County Sheriff’s deputy is recovering after he was brutally taken down, tasered and abused by his fellow deputies—because he was sick.
The incident was captured on video and the disturbing images make a powerful point. When your only tool is a hammer, everything begins to look like nails—even your fellow cops.
The attack on the deputy was so disturbing that a BCSO employee and witness to it reached out to KENS 5 news in San Antonio to expose it. According to the BCSO employee, the deputy was simply sick—as in not feeling well—and was allegedly mistaken by his fellow cops as being disorderly.
Instead of talking to him or simply relieving him of his duty, a Special Emergency Response Team (SERT), consisting of a half dozen cops in riot gear, armed with an arsenal of non-lethal weapons, was called in to take the deputy out.
In the video, we see the SERT officers pile on top of the sick deputy while one officer repeatedly tasers him. As the deputy writhes in agony on the ground, officers put him in handcuffs and shackled his legs.
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“He just popped him, he just popped him on my orders,” a sergeant can be heard saying in the video.
Several minutes into the video, and the taser prongs are still in the deputy.
According to KENS:
The memo says this all started when the Sergeant found the corporal standing up against a wall.
The Sergeant told investigators the corporal was acting strange and ignoring him.
The Sergeant, according to the documents, ordered a SERT officer to pull his Taser, which was then deployed when the officer says the sick corporal tried to hit his leg.
“Take me out of the handcuffs, they’re cutting off my circulation. I’m asking for a little bit of help,” said the corporal after being attacked by his fellow cops.
READ MORE: New System for Police to "Detect Gunshots" is Also Recording Your Private Conversations
According to the internal document, as reported by KENS 5, the corporal told investigators, “I was feeling dizzy, trying to hold myself up on the wall. I was spitting up blood. I didn’t have any time to respond.”
The corporal went on to say, “I have had this happen before, but I was taken care of by my fellow, first shift officers. I wasn’t wrestled to the floor and cycled for 3 times.”
The fact that a cop received such brutal treatment from his fellow cops speaks to the violent nature of police in America. When they begin to cannibalize their own, something terrible is brewing.
The BCSO is even admitting to the brutal takedown of one of their own for being sick.
According to a daily blotter obtained by KENS 5, the Sheriff’s Office said, “Due to a medical condition an officer had to be restrained.”
After refusing to comment on the video for several days, the Sherrif finally came forward on Friday to make a statement.
As to why a gang of his deputies attacked a fellow deputy for seemingly no reason, the sheriff had little to say.
“I have seen that video. There is a current investigation ongoing with that case and we’re looking at all angles of it,” Sheriff Javier Salazar said.
“I was glad the video existed. That’s the reason we have body cameras on our SERT officers, is for any incidents that might arise in the jail,” Sheriff Salazar said. “It was captured from several different angles, so it gives us a good, well-rounded view of what happened to allow us to make an educated decision when the time comes.”
READ MORE: WATCH: "Stop Fingering Me Bro": Cop Repeatedly Sticks His Finger in Innocent Man"s Anus
According to the report, the corporal was taken to a local hospital to receive treatment for his injuries and, according to the sheriff, he has received no punishment.
Are police necessary? Although this existential question often produces a knee-jerk ‘of course they are, who would protect us?’ a growing call for the abolition of police — and working examples to back it up — deserves more than scornful dismissal, particularly amid epidemic-level violence by agents of the state.
Police are under no obligation to protect the public they putatively serve — a series of state and Supreme Court decisions stretching back more than three decades indisputably establish this fact — so the lingering question, ‘who will protect us?’ is of no consequence to the case for dismantling every police department in the nation.
On the contrary, police kill, maim, intimidate, harass, and generally brutalize the citizenry with alarming frequency — and rarely face consequences beyond a paid vacation farcically termed ‘administrative leave’ for doing so.
Rather than fight and solve violent crimes, police act as little more than heavily militarized code-enforcers, or as David Graeber of the London School of Economics aptly terms, “bureaucrats with weapons” — protecting us from broken tail lights, missing front license plates, and imperfect lane changes more often than from robbery, homicide, and rape.
Give police the equipment and weapons of war under the premise of fighting terrorism, when terrorism is all but nonexistent, and predictably, they will go to war. As Abraham Maslow posited in 1966 in a concept known as the law of the instrument, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
We, the citizenry, are not nails to be forcibly and violently coerced into submission over the tiniest of nonviolent and inconsequential infractions — but, whether or not we’re inclined to admit as much, that summarizes our current situation in the eyes of an overbearing state and its criminalization of, in essence, daily life.
How this police state cinched a noose-like grip on the nation, at this late date, arguably matters little in deference to the urgency it must be addressed. And while solutions run the gamut from individual officer liability insurance to the use of body cameras, forcing an on-call policy akin to that of fire departments to an overhaul of training policies, as it becomes apparent nothing will be done, the larger aforementioned existential question must come into play.
Are police a necessary element in an ordered, peaceful society?
In short, the answer is no — absolutely not — largely because police spend such little time policing anything other than ridiculous laws created solely for the purpose of revenue generation to justify their own existence.
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Graeber writes:
“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals — indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you.
“The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force — even, death — into situations where it never would have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
READ MORE: Court Rules Non-consensual Oral Sex is not Rape if Victim is Unconscious from Drinking
This overcriminalization of, well, living, has exploded prison populations and adversarial policing to a profoundly negative effect. In the beginning of 2015, the number of federal criminal laws exceeded 4,500 — over 27,000 pages of United States federal code — with Congress creating crimes where none previously existed at a rate of 50 new criminal laws each year. And that only covers federal law — add state and local criminal codes and it’s estimated the average American unknowingly commits three felonies every day.
According to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “our nation’s addiction to criminalization backlogs our judiciary, overflows our prisons, and forces innocent individuals to plead guilty not because they actually are, but because exercising their constitutional right to a trial is prohibitively expensive and too much of a risk.”
These purported crimes, however, largely have nothing at all to do with true harm committed against another — though brutal responses by police and filled-beyond-capacity prisons would have you thinking otherwise. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. incarcerates no less than 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This stunning surplus of criminal law, coupled with the government’s military equipment giveaway to law enforcement departments which have little need for it, has put the populace in the altogether dangerous position of being 58 times more likely to be killed by an officer of the law than by a terrorist.
Once an individual has a criminal record, possible future interactions with police become a risky endeavor, indeed — it already doesn’t take evidence of wrongdoing to put an officer on guard, but a criminal blip on someone’s record during an otherwise routine traffic stop creates wholly unnecessary tension where none should exist. Especially if that crime was collecting rainwater, living off-grid, keeping rabbits in the backyard, or any of the untold number of patently absurd behaviors now deemed verboten by the state — and the scope of this article won’t even touch on the untold tragedies fueled by the failed war on drugs.
Loosely in line with the law of the instrument, citizens have become opportunities for revenue generation, as police patrol the streets searching for anyone stepping out of line with some misbegotten code. We are little more than adversarial dollar signs to these roving bands of armed enforcers of extraneous laws — targets to be plundered and pillaged, harassed and shaken down, to generate revenue and therefore justify the continuation of Big Government.
In the absence of policing, justice, prison, and criminal code reform, several viable options present themselves for consideration — perhaps most imperatively among them, the complete abolishment of police.
To posit the populace would devolve into chaos and violence without police departments ignores the chaos and violence wrought by police — not to mention the very real historical proof a correctly and fully-functioning society can and will police itself.
First, consider the sizable financial feedback loop perpetuated by an excessively intrusive nanny state and its armed agents of enforcement. Taxpayers shoulder the cost of disproportionately large police forces, which crack down on petty criminals instead of preventing murders, rapes, and significant property crimes. Then taxpayers fund overburdened public defenders and backlogged courts, prisons, probation officers, and legislators in their effort to criminalize yet more ridiculously innocuous behaviors. It’s neverending. It’s unsustainable. And it’s not going to fix itself — not in ways significant enough to warrant further discussion.
READ MORE: CA Cop is Being Fired for NOT Using Violence to Resolve a Situation
As of 2011, according to a 2013 study by the associate dean of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, Victor E. Kappeler, a mere two of 14 arrests were for violent or property crimes. If police truly existed to fight actual crime, not the overwhelmingly excessive number of ‘crimes’ created by lawmakers, departments would be slashed in staff dramatically.
Kappeler writes:
“If we take all the violent crimes reported to the police in 2011, we find that there were 1,203,564 violent crimes (FBI, 2012). Since more than 885,000 people worked as sworn officers in that same year (BJS 2012), there were 1.36 violent crimes reported for every police officer employed in the U.S. If crime were dispersed evenly across the nation’s police, then this would mean that in 2011 each police officer would have been responsible for investigating just over a single violent crime. And since we know that a relatively small number of criminals are responsible for the vast majority of crime in a society, each cop would be responsible for even fewer criminals.”
After the hotly controversial deaths by police of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, the call for police reform intensified exponentially. While undoubtedly well-intentioned in motive, years of begging nicely for the broken system to fix itself have, as to be expected, fallen on deaf ears.
Abolishing police entirely might reek of radicalism to a nation cowed by constant government fear propaganda, but considering how little violence is present in our current society — compared to just decades ago — examples already in place prove the concept has teeth.
Trained and unarmed intervention teams consisting of civilians — often former violent offenders, themselves — can and do defuse potentially violent conflicts in their own neighborhoods in major cities from Los Angeles to Detroit, as noted by Rolling Stone. Indeed, conflict resolution as a community program has effectively prevented criminal activity, improved neighborhood relations, reduced gang violence, and resolved — without the involvement of police or courts — crimes which have already occurred.
Ethan Ucker, cofounder of Circles & Ciphers — “a leadership training a conflict resolution program for young men who’ve been in prison, jail, or a gang,” which began in Chicago — facilitates “peace circles.” Though ‘peace circles’ will likely evoke images of stoned hippies around a campfire for many, the concept has done the extraordinary in a community once awash in violence and gang activity.
In just one anecdotal example Ucker offered to the Chicago Reader recently,
“There was a robbery at this store in the community. One of the people at the store whose stuff was taken said, ‘Look, I don’t want to call the cops. Is there anything we can do?’ … They found on Facebook that this young person was selling their stuff, and that young person happened to go to a school where we’d done some circles, so I knew a teacher at the school and could say, ‘Hey, this is where we’re at.’”
Eventually, robber and robbed were brought together in an attempt to resolve the wrongdoing.
“That young person ended up returning what he had that hadn’t been sold, and then working at the shop in restitution for everything else. Then it turned out he really liked working there, and after this agreement was over, he continued to go there and volunteer. There was a relationship built there.”
READ MORE: Security Camera Footage Shows Horrednous Unprovoked Attack on Man
That relationship among community members can act as a compelling deterrent against crime — the better one knows a neighbor, the less likely they are to rob or victimize them. This cannot be said of police in 2017, as officers often don’t live in the neighborhoods they police, which creates a degree of separation and personal investment from the ultimate outcome of any interaction — decreasing the hesitation to act violently in an encounter that wouldn’t ordinarily call for the use of force.
In some manifestations, this community solution subverting the need to involve police and the court system is termed ‘reparative or transformative justice’ — about which José Martín writes for Rolling Stone has appeared in cities across the U.S., like “Philadelphia’s experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process.”
Putting the community back in community policing while abolishing police as armed agents for revenue generation can effect sweeping changes to an increasingly polarized and distanced society. Rather than the financial feedback loop apparent in our [in] justice system presently, defunding police loosens taxpayer dollars to reinstate mental health and addiction programs — two conditions of which often drive actual violent crime — among many other effective solutions.
When our rights have been pawned away by a money-hungry system, the only means left to reclaim those rights stands in wresting excessive power from those who would misuse and abuse it, in often brutal ways.
Police aren’t serving the people who pay their salaries — and are under no obligation to do so — but if they aren’t solving crimes or protecting the citizenry, whose purposes do they serve?
As Graeber, writing after the Department of Justice published a scathing report on systemic racism and excessive fines as pattern and practice in Ferguson, Missouri, continues, “in recent decades, local governments have become deeply indebted to large, private financial institutions — many of the same ones that brought of us the crash of 2008. (In Ferguson, for instance, the amount of revenue collected from fines corresponds almost exactly to that shelled out to service municipal debt.) Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors.”
Ferguson is, of course, far from an isolated example. One wonders if those who unfalteringly defend the violent police state would as adamantly stand behind them if police were more accurately portrayed as state-sponsored, armed thugs for Big Banks and corporate America.
Notice none of these arguments for abolishing police criticize officers as individuals — except for an obviously growing number of bad apples, many officers chose policing as an occupation with protecting and serving in mind. But that arguably laudable goal is a vapid remnant of what has become policing for profit at the expense of communities nationwide. And unless an altogether unlikely revamping of overcriminalization takes place soon, officers serve no one but state and corporate interests — thus those who argue police put their lives on the line miss that they do so at the behest of the system oppressing us all to meet its financial goals.
No perfect solution for police violence exists, and in the absence of wholesale reform, abolishing American police might be our only realistic and suitable solution.
It’s been two years since Baltimore Police mandated the death penalty for 25-year-old Freddie Gray, for the truly heinous crime of possessing a “switchblade.”
In those two years, police attempted to downplay the gravity of what Gray evidently endured during one of their notoriously signature “nickel rides” — but, as with any case of this magnitude, the truth trickled out only well after protests quelled and public outrage took aim at another of countless unjustified police homicides.
Telling is the mundanity in the news of legally-permissible, ethically-intolerable police violence — that Gray’s untimely and unnecessary demise has faded from headlines sardonically evinces this epidemic so many dismiss as unfounded until its frosty hand touches their lives.
After securing handcuffs and often leg restraints — but not belting passengers to the vehicle — officers transporting arrestees to the station, drive recklessly, purposefully doing their utmost to ensure maximum bumps, bruises, and worse — Gray’s spinal cord was almost entirely severed in what the medical examiner said resulted from a single, “high-energy” injury event.
His neck likely snapped upon impact when the officer driving slammed on the brakes — intentionally inflicting maximum damage upon Gray, who, of course, had yet to be tried, much less convicted, in a court of law.
That officers of the law, took it upon themselves to administer capital punishment, without the hindrance of the justice system, is the very definition of extrajudicial killing. Accordingly, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges on May 1, 2015, and a grand jury indicted all six officers involved in Gray’s arrest and fatal transport less than a month later.
Progress cutting through the Thin Blue Line of impunity, it seemed, had been made — until each methodically escaped punishment for the ‘unofficially’ capital crime.
Despite a laundry list of charges from second-degree murder to second-degree manslaughter to misconduct in office, Lieutenant Brian Rice and Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson were acquitted, while Officer Garrett Miller, Sergeant Alicia White, and Officer William Porter had charges dropped by the State.
On this solemn two-year anniversary of Gray’s appalling killing, Rolling Stone explained,
“Freddie Gray became a national news story thanks to a man named Kevin Moore, who filmed the last few minutes of Gray’s arrest. After giving a copy of the video to investigators, Moore uploaded the footage online and it quickly went viral. It showed Gray being held face down on the sidewalk by officers Garrett Miller and Edward Nero, screaming in pain. His ankles were crossed and his knees bent, with Miller’s weight pushing his heels in his rear, a police hold known as a leg lace.
“While Moore’s video was shown in court at the police officers’ trials, he was never called to testify. Neither were any of the dozen-plus residents who witnessed Gray’s arrest that morning, despite many of them giving damning interviews to the media under their own names. Some of these witnesses were interviewed by detectives, but their accounts – of Taser use, of seeing an officer put his knee in Gray’s neck, of Freddie crying out that they were hurting his back and his legs – were dismissed by both the police and prosecutors. Other officers who were present during the arrest, but weren’t charged, testified that Gray was only trying to attract attention, but witnesses maintain his screams were real.”
Rolling Stone interviewed some of the witnesses in revisiting what happened to Gray during that ordeal — something that can’t be said of the State’s Attorney’s Office, whose investigators had claimed to be performing an independent probe.
Yet, a number of eyewitnesses who spoke with local and national media outlets were never contacted by detectives or investigators.
“You can hear him making noise, like, he’s in pain,” Jacqueline Jackson, who saw the second of several stops during Gray’s transport from the vantage point of her kitchen window, told Rolling Stone for its series, Undisclosed. “It was just sad.… I told them, ‘What are y’all doing to that young man?’ They told me I needed to mind my M-Fing business.”
Jackson observed three officers try once to stuff the young African American man into the back of the transport van after shackling his legs — then “they threw him face down, head first and hard into the metal van compartment. Even from inside her house, she could hear a loud thump, followed by Gray’s moans.”
Eventually, the callous officers found Gray unresponsive and summoned emergency services. After a week-long coma, the young man — whose weapon, in actuality, did not violate the law — succumbed to those maliciously-inflicted injuries.
Discrepancies in nearly every aspect of the case remain and never have been explained by police or prosecutors. Optimistically speaking of our Injustice System, they probably never will.
Freddie Gray — like Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Dylan Noble, Philando Castile, and a disturbingly lengthy list of others — will only have died needlessly when his name ceases to roll from lips recounting that period when the American Police State shed pretense and began to flex its authoritarian self.
This near pandemic-level police brutality and impunity exists to test the boundaries of public tolerance to the unacceptable. It’s a sick method, if perhaps tacit, that a State cognizant of discontent among the citizenry repeatedly pushes the limits of acceptability.
And when police find murmurings of support from the mouths of those who would sooner have violent revolution than be visited with a similar tragedy at the whims of police, there will be no solutions to this problem.
Instead of justice, five of his excused killers summoned the deplorable gall to sue Mosby for false arrest, false imprisonment, and defamation of character — claiming the arrest had been lawful and justified, despite the determination Gray’s knife was legal.
Freddie Gray should still be alive — and the lack of punishment for his death and thousands of other police victims paints a dire picture of just how acceptable State violence has become.
Purcell, OK — An allegedly inebriated officer — who fell from his motorcycle and proceeded to shoot a tiny dog with his service weapon for no reason — has now been charged in the incident.
“They said that he fell over on his motorcycle and that he had shot my dog, Champion,” the dog’s owner told KFOR in October.
“It caught this leg, and hopefully if I can keep the infection out of his joint, he won’t lose his paw,” the owner added hopefully of where a bullet from Purcell Police Officer Richard Kyle Glasgow’s service revolver entered the beloved pet’s body.
Glasgow has now been charged with ‘one count of reckless conduct with a firearm’ — for which the officer ‘demonstrated a conscious disregard for the safety of others and created a situation of unreasonable risk and probability of death or great bodily harm to others.’
Considering the portrait of grave fecklessness described in charges, and that the officer left the creature bloodied, suffering, and ultimately forced to endure an amputation, ‘reckless conduct’ hardly encompasses the scale of the threat this drunken cop posed.
NewsOn6 briefly summarizes, “On Oct. 8, 2016 Glasgow told authorities he was riding his motorcycle in McClain County when he said a dog named Champion came out after his motorcycle and he feared for his life so he fired a warning shot into the ground and another shot at the dog. Champion was wounded and lost his right front paw as a result of the shooting.”
Neighbors noted Glasgow, who lives in the area, had been known to complain about Champion running loose in the streets — but that had not happened on October 8.
“He fell over and then he took his gun and then shot twice,” the dog’s owner lamented, adding witnesses “heard two shots and then the dog yelped.”
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Glasgow’s erratic actions — firing a weapon at a friendly dog not even tall enough to reach an average adult’s knees — might be explained in part, though not excused, by what officers responding to the shooting discovered when they arrived.
“While talking to Glasgow I could smell a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from his person, and could hear slurred speech as he spoke,” asserted an unnamed deputy attending the scene, in a police report cited by NewsOn6.
Responding officers made no arrests at the time — and have not elaborated on that failure — despite descriptions like the aforementioned which strongly indicate Glasgow had imbibed too much to have been driving.
Adding further insult, “authorities took the officer’s patrol car that he drove back from the scene,” as KFOR paraphrased the incident report.
Also, as News 9 reported in October when the original incident happened, Glasgow had previously threatened to shoot the dog.
Glasgow reported a previous incident with the dog while riding his motorcycle in the same area – stating the dog “ran out into the street almost causing him to wreck his motorcycle with his child on the back of it.” So Glasgow said he told the landowner “she needed to keep her dog put up or he would shoot it.”
Friday afternoon, the landowner Sherry Reece said she believed he mistook Champion for the neighbor’s German Shepherd. “He told me that two German Shepherds were running out toward him on his motorcycle and he had his child with him and he had to swerve and he almost fell over with his child,” she explained. “I said ‘OK I’ll tell Junior. He’s the one that owns the German Shepherds.’”
Indeed, Glasgow — who remains employed by the Purcell Police Department, but has been gifted a paid suspension pending the outcomes of multiple investigations — would almost certainly have had to perform sobriety tests for officers, were he not an officer, himself.
Without additional, theoretical charges for operating under the influence, Glasgow faces the possibility of just six months to one year in county jail and a fine of between $50 and $500 — a striking contrast to what a non-cop perpetrator would in the same situation.
Another disparity between the treatment of cop lawbreakers and civilian offenders is that, had Champion been employed as a trained law enforcement K-9 and Glasgow an ordinary civilian, he would have been charged with a federal offense.
ABC News reported in 2000, upon the passing of new legislation designed to further protections for animals trained to work as law enforcement officers,
“Under the Federal Law Enforcement Animal Protection Act, which went into effect this week, anyone convicted of purposely assaulting, maiming, or killing federal law enforcement animals such as police dogs and horses could be fined at least $1,000 and spend up to 10 years in prison. Previously, the animals were covered by a variety of state, rather than federal, laws.”
But Champion isn’t a police K-9. Thus his life — and the gunshot wound resulting from an officer’s wanton disregard for safety — could be worth as little as $50, per Oklahoma law.
Such disproportionate penalties for the law enforcement community compared to, well, everyone else, echoes the precipitous chasm cleaving the nation between obdurate supporters of the Thin Blue Line and those who know the bequeathed badge and gun do not grant extra rights.
Countless family pets, like Champion, have been unfortunate enough to encounter police officers far too skittish to have ever considered the profession of law enforcement.
The Free Thought Project contacted the Purcell Police Department on a particularly pressing aspect of this case, which hasn’t been made entirely clear in news reports of the shooting — whether or not Glasgow was on duty at the time — but, at the time this article went to press, had yet to receive a return call.
While an embarrassing number of Americans still swallow the drug war’s laughably fictitious marijuana prohibition propaganda, SWAT raids to confiscate the plant ludicrously deemed illegal by the State kill people at an exponentially higher rate than weed, itself.
Cannabis has never been the cause of a fatal overdose.
Data amassed by the New York Times “or the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.”
Euphemistically-termed “dynamic entry” raids allow militarily-clad police to smash through doors with assault weapons drawn, demand anyone present comply immediately, and, far too frequently, shoot first and claim imminent threat later.
Such reprehensible exertion of control through violent tactics seemingly lifted from gestapo manuals — particularly to enforce the much-maligned prohibition of cannabis — was never the intended use of police SWAT. As the Washington Post explains,
“The modern-day SWAT team originated in Los Angeles in the late 1960s as a way to deal with gunmen targeting police officers or civilians. But today SWAT teams are mostly used to handle routine warrant work, especially drug warrants. A 2014 ACLU study found that nearly 80 percent of SWAT deployments were to serve search warrants. Just 7 percent of SWAT deployments involved ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.’”
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A patchwork of state laws now govern the legality of the plant falsely classified as lacking any medical value, as a Schedule 1 substance, by the FDA and Drug Enforcement Agency — whose own website hypocritically also states, “No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported” — making it possible to buy weed in a store in one state, and die because of it just over state lines.
Yet cops still maintain blank slate to crash through doors, ransack homes, confiscate property and cash, and — inexcusably — shoot to kill, even though the government knows its own cannabis prohibition is a scam.
Although debate furiously ensues over whether suspect or cop is to blame when headlines detail the latest traffic stop turned fatal shooting by police, in door-smashing SWAT raids, police always act as the aggressor. With adrenaline heightening fear and sometimes clouding threat perception — and inexplicable administrative mistakes, such as incorrect address — uninvolved parties pay the price with disquieting regularity.
“Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass.,” reports the Times. “Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog […]
“In a country where four in 10 adults have guns in their homes, the raids incite predictable collisions between forces that hurtle toward each other like speeding cars in a passing lane — officers with a license to invade private homes and residents convinced of their right to self-defense.
“After being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of stun grenades, bleary suspects reach for nearby weapons — at times realizing it is the police, at others mistaking them for intruders — and the shooting begins.”
Contrary to the Times’ intimation, officers regularly shoot first — first, that is, if the subjects of the raid even possess weapons, or, if they do, regardless of whether or not they take aim at officers.
Innumerable tales of SWAT raids gone horrifically awry detail State-sanctioned maimings, the utter annihilation of property, slaughter of family pets, stray bullets finding unfortunate targets, and other gruesome outcomes — all for nonviolent crimes involving ostensively illicit substances the State made verboten for Americans it must condescendingly view as incapable of self control.
But times — and the national attitude toward weed — are changing. Over half of the states in the nation have shirked federal law in favor of medical cannabis, and eight states and the District of Columbia allow recreational use. Americans who believe the ban should be lifted in some way increase in number each time a survey assesses the national attitude toward the beneficial plant.
The United States undeniably failed in its bellicose campaign to eradicate ‘evil’ marijuana, but — as ineffective yet profitable policies go — cannabis prohibition remains official federal law.
A prime example of the inanity of profit-seeking trumping the prudence of lifting the ban on cannabis comes from a 2013 SWAT raid recounted by the Post, in which an informant — considered almost wholly unreliable in multiple analyses — snitched on Henry Magee for allegedly possessing 12 cannabis plants.
“Groggy and disoriented by the commotion” of a pre-dawn, door-busting police raid, the Post reports, “Magee grabbed a semi-automatic rifle and began firing in the direction of the door that the officers had just battered down. His live-in girlfriend, four months pregnant at the time, thought they were being robbed.
“When Magee and his girlfriend heard the police announce themselves, they immediately surrendered. By then, police investigator Frederich Sowders lay dead on the floor. They later recovered 10 marijuana plants and 4 ounces of dried marijuana from his home.”
A grand jury acquitted Magee of capital murder.
“All of us felt that if I were in bed and heard anything that made me get up and get a gun, and all of a sudden my door explodes in, I’m shooting,” one juror told the Times, adding in disbelief, “Why in the world would you do a full-out assault on a guy growing pot?”
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Why, indeed.
Yellow Springs, OH — Comedian Dave Chappelle was moved to attend a city council meeting in the small Ohio town where he lives, following a New Year’s Eve incident in which officers acted aggressively toward revelers — to call out what many felt was the small town’s dangerous flirtation with brutal policing.
Duly noting Yellow Springs Police have, indeed, assisted him on two occasions, Chappelle turned to the law enforcement panel and scolded sternly,
“Huge gaffe, New Year’s Eve.”
Affirmative murmurs from the residents in attendance made clear the comedian and political activist wasn’t alone in criticizing police for deploying Tasers against possibly-inebriated African American holidaymakers.
With a predominantly caucasian population of around 3,500 — and students attending private Antioch College — Yellow Springs is more sleepy, quirky enclave than bustling city, thus has not experienced the worst of a shamefully rampant police violence issue.
Per New Year’s Eve tradition, a crowd gathered downtown to celebrate and watch a disco ball drop at midnight — but the atmosphere turned strangely sour as the event drew to a close. The Chicago Tribune reports,
“Residents told the New York Times that officers began clearing the crowd more swiftly than usual. As they moved to disperse the residents, police said, according to the Times, that a 29-year-old black man named David Carlson, who was drunk, began to threaten officers and hit a squad car. An attorney for Carlson denied he was aggressive. After one officer forced Carlson to the ground, he slipped away into the mostly white crowd, which tried to prevent officers from following him.”
READ MORE: Disturbing Video of Cop Trying to Choke a Handcuffed Teen Surfaces on Facebook
In other words, the crowd moved to prevent unnecessary violence or arrest by police against a man who might have been drinking too heavily at a holiday event. But that didn’t stop the cops.
“There was a Taser deployed in a crowd and it missed,” an anonymous eyewitness told the Yellow Springs News at the time. “It could have hit a child.”
So rare are incidents where police in Yellow Springs have had to employ force of this nature, many residents were stunned the violence, albeit on a constricted scale, had finally touched their town.
Witness and 20-year resident, Anita Brown, told Yellow Springs News, as quoted by the Tribune, the officers seemed “emotionless, with no sense of caring. I witnessed villagers de-escalating and officers escalating, it was so strange, it seemed so backwards.”
“In all fairness,” Chappelle said to audience laughter, discussing the holiday scofflaw, “the crowd was drunk.” He added, deadpan, “because it was New Year’s Eve. … And, I left early, because nobody felt completely ‘right.’”
In response to ensuing contention, if perhaps in deference to outrage against police departments nationwide — those whose errant officers and corrupt supervisors frequently fail to be disciplined for controversial wrongdoings — Yellow Springs Police Chief Dave Hale resigned from the force on January 3.
On Monday, Chappelle attended the village council meeting to advocate for immediate reform of policing, with an eye to community relations, saying the council has “a tremendous opportunity for us to be a leader in progressive law enforcement.”
Where the bond between the community and police shattered was the shift from officers who live in the areas they serve. Noting when he attended school, everyone knew various officers because their children or other family members attended the same schools, Chappelle observed,
“Now we are being policed by what feels like an alien force.”
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Thanks to the government’s military surplus giveaway to local and state law enforcement, an aggressive and combatant — and staunchly authoritarian — method of policing has supplanted the albeit Rockwellian image of Officer Friendly patrolling with a smile, ostensively just decades ago.
Chappelle’s comparison might be new for tiny Yellow Springs, Ohio, but images of stormtrooper cops in military and riot gear, sometimes sporting imposing face shields, automatic rifles, and usually backed by armored vehicles — sometimes menacing, always intimidating — have splashed periodically across headlines for years.
As civilians fight tooth and nail to reform police forces nationwide, the violence wrought by those with a badge and gun continues to infect even the smallest havens like Chappelle’s hometown.
For the down-to-earth, politically-aware comedian, stepping to the mic to be a resounding voice of caution and to advocate for preemptive change is a way to draw attention to a timely cause.
“This is an opportunity to show everybody that local politics reigns supreme,” Chappelle concluded. “We can make our corner of the world outstanding.”
Parkland, WA — An 8-year-old elementary school student involved in what would have been considered an ordinary playground fight just a decade ago, had his hands pulled behind his back and cuffed by a school resource officer — and the boy’s outraged mother is speaking out.
Amanda Bullinger told Seattle NBC affiliate KING she was summoned to Brookdale Elementary School in Parkland on Monday after her son, Ayden, scuffled with an older student who had been bullying the boy for months.
“It was like 11:15-ish that I got a call. It was the principal,” Bullinger told the station. “She said she had Ayden in the office and he had an altercation at recess.”
Bullinger drove to the school to retrieve Ayden, but had no idea what a disturbing scene awaited.
“I get there and I see a police car in the parking lot, and I said, ‘Oh this can’t be good.’ I go into the office and Ayden is sitting in a chair, hands cuffed behind his back and a police officer is holding him down like this,” she explained to KING. “And Ayden is bright red crying, freaking out.”
Not even a decade old, the understandably frightened child also struggles with sensory processing disorder, according to Bullinger, which means intense situations can cause Ayden to suffer extreme anxiety or ‘emotional meltdowns.’
According to NBC affiliate KOBI, “Federal privacy laws prohibit the school from discussing details, but a police report about the incident shows Ayden yelling ‘I’m going to kill him’ and became physically combative to the other boy.”
Bullinger noted her son had grown tired of months of bullying by the older child and the situation reached a boiling point on the school’s playground.
Thanks to the suffocating police state, what would likely have been a bitter student brawl broken up by students and teachers in the past instead saw an 8-year-old child handcuffed by an officer and forcefully restrained — as if a schoolyard fight is no longer typical childhood behavior.
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“It really is one of those options of last resort, if you will,” Willie Painter, spokesman for Franklin-Pierce Schools, explained to KING.
“The use of restraint is only used when no other feasible option exists.”
Painter did not elaborate on the circumstances involving Ayden or why, specifically, ‘no other feasible option’ existed to deal with an 8-year-old but to cuff him like a violent criminal.
In fact, it’s difficult to imagine why a school resource officer would need to handcuff a small 8-year-old child at all — even if the melee turned particularly violent or vengeful, the officer could have restrained the child with assistance from another adult. Handcuffs seem like overkill — particularly considering the officer did not release Ayden’s wrists, even after he arrived in the principal’s office.
After arriving on the distressing scene, Bullinger said the resource officer escorted the terrified child to the door.
Alarmingly, the handcuffs marked and bruised Ayden’s wrists — but his mother believes the emotional wounds from being forcefully restrained will linger for some time.
KING reports:
“The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction just began collecting data in 2016. In the first 6 months of that year, only eight districts have used handcuffs on students. Franklin-Pierce is one of them.
“The other districts are Federal Way, Freeman, Highline, Kelso, Kent, Renton, and Spokane. The state information did not give clear numbers of how many cases of handcuffing happened in elementary schools.”
An increase in police presence at public schools has stirred contention for several years, as these officers have been caught treating students from elementary to high school as if they’re full grown adults.
In 2016, students were beaten, slammed to the ground and knocked unconscious, put in an ‘arm bar’ submission restraint, locked in a full nelson, assaulted for no reason, and more — and that’s only a cursory glance at what errant school cops almost got away with.
Bullinger rightly questioned the choice to handcuff a child of only eight years, asserting, “There could have been other options.”
READ MORE: Video Shows Cop Choking EMT for Advising Against Him Tasering Injured Man
There could have been, except this is what an otherwise ordinary schoolyard fight looks like in a police state.
Propaganda might tell you attackers lie in wait to pick off police at every opportunity, but the fact remains there simply is no war on cops — and while special protections and charges await anyone using violence against authorities, that hasn’t stopped 32 separate so-called Blue Lives Matter bills from being introduced in 14 different states. In just the first two months of the year.
Yes, last year unofficially saw the deaths of 64 officers — the highest tally since 2011, and well above the 41 who died in 2015 — but the figure more accurately proves the lack of an underlying agenda against police, given there were 134 officers killed in 1973. That in no way is meant to dismiss or lessen the tragedy of those deaths, of course, but to illustrate the inanity of claims cops are under siege.
In other words, choosing the occupation of police officer still won’t automatically put someone in mortal danger — no matter what the pro-police propagandists wish you would believe.
Rampant violence against police — however factually unsound — has provided the impetus for some of the most absurdly redundant, unnecessary, and rights-stripping legislation in a growing number of states.
Known as Blue Lives Matter laws, such legislation cements the armor of protectionist policies granted to an individual who, by free will, decides to become a police officer — offensively conflating an occupation with traditionally marginalized segments of society who face quite real prejudice and have endured violence en masse historically.
An assault undertaken because someone is black, gay, or Jewish, for example, would, of course, be considered a hate crime. Cops — an occupation taken by choice — are now being given the same protected status.
According to Huffington Post, which analyzed legislation passed, proposed, and failed in various states, “Last year, Louisiana became the first state to loop law enforcement into its state hate crime statute, with its so-called ‘Blue Lives Matter’ bill. Several states soon followed. The Mississippi state Senate advanced a similar bill on Jan. 26, and the Kentucky House of Representatives advanced its own version on Feb. 13.”
Sharp and bitter division between police and civilians has worsened, in particular, since 2014’s hotly contentious police killings of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and unarmed Eric Garner in New York City — and what is widely considered an epidemic of violence by police.
As far as bridging the chasm between cops and the communities they’re tasked with policing, imperiously claiming the choice to wear a uniform and badge should grant someone an additional shield of legal superiority isn’t the way to go.
Further, Blue Lives Matter laws aren’t needed.
“[C]ritics say adding police to hate-crime statutes is unnecessary because there are already laws mandating longer sentences for those convicted of attacking police. Unlike hate-crime laws, those laws do not require prosecutors to prove the motive for an assault,” Pew reports.
“Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also worry that expanding hate-crime laws to cover police or other professions would dilute their original intent: ratcheting up the punishment for acts designed to intimidate whole communities.”
As senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potok, explained for HuffPost, “In the vast majority of states, you will get life or considerably less in prison for murder; but if you murder a police officer, you are almost certain to get death. So the truth is that including police in hate crime laws is merely a political statement ― and an unnecessary one at that.”
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Unnecessary and, thus, also a passive-aggressive thumbed nose at the communities who experience greater violence, profiling, and general harassment by cops — particularly African Americans, given the pompous usurpation of the phrase begging for a level playing field in the first place, Black Lives Matter.
Remember, police aren’t under siege at all — but that mythos has so inundated popular culture and is parroted by authoritarian politicians intent on molding a compliant populace slavish to the rule of law, that it’s generally blindly accepted without necessary questions.
Ardent police supporters will undoubtedly point to the increase in duty-related deaths last year as an admonishment to get serious about protecting officers — but that would be a mistake, according to Northeastern University criminologist, Jack Levin, who told HuffPo this is “hardly a long-term trend.”
“Police officers are doing better as victims of crime than they have for many decades,” he continued. “This is, hopefully, a short-term blip and not a trend. If we see that the number of ambushes of police officers continues to rise, then it may be worth taking another look at the possibility of including them in hate crime laws.”
Again, Blue Lives Matter legislation isn’t necessary, not now and probably not in the future, but laws to protect Americans’ rights when dealing with violent and sometimes corrupt cops, actually is.
Incidentally, police protectionist law often makes holding police accountable for wrongdoing an even more Herculean task than it already was — particularly for those marginalized by both police and society.
“These movements to hold police accountable are not about targeting individuals, but they’re targeting a system that is highly trained, highly weaponized, and has a great deal of power over some of the most marginalized communities that exist in society,” explained Shelby Chestnut, director of community organizing and public advocacy with The New York City Anti-Violence Project.
In fact, many members of such communities have called cops’ bluffs, saying police protectionism isn’t a misinterpretation of current law nor necessary to alleviate a war on police — but instead intends a snide message on the absolute power held by the badge.
“Any legislation for a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ bill seeks to instill intimidation and fear,” Mike Lowe, a San Antonio area Black Lives Matter activist, told HuffPo. “These protections make it easy to silence the voices of those seeking justice and accountability. I will not be silenced by it. All we want is justice and accountability, and law enforcement officers must be held accountable.”
Sadly, Police State provisions like the military giveaway, 1033 program, and legislation granting cops privileged status — not to mention pervasive impunity, given officers actually charged and found guilty of wrongdoing are a rarity — virtually guarantee police accountability will go by the wayside.
Blue Lives Matter laws constitute a slap in the face and a demand for respect — but respect has to be earned, not cajoled. Training officers not to use excessive and deadly force on a whim, and lengthy sentences for misbehavior, would go orders of magnitude further to win over civilians than any privileged status law ever will.
“We are prepared to put our bodies between Native elders and a privatized military force,” Elizabeth Williams, a U.S. Air Force veteran, told the Guardian on her decision to come to Standing Rock as a human shield.
Williams and perhaps hundreds of other military veterans are descending on several remaining camps at Cannon Ball, North Dakota, near the banks of the Missouri River’s Lake Oahe reservoir in a last stand against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“This is a humanitarian issue,” asserted U.S. Navy veteran Matthew Crane. “We’re not going to stand by and let anybody get hurt.”
But things could get ugly. They have multiple times in the past.
Indeed, hostilities have increased on every front — the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Council voted to ask water protectors not from the area to go home. A multi-state police force led by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department randomly employs violence against water protectors it also wishes would leave.
Meanwhile, the few hundred water protectors remaining in Standing Rock have vowed to halt the pipeline, no matter the cost — up to and including paying with their lives. That’s where the veterans come in — they see shielding the unarmed water protectors as not only the right thing to do, but as duty.
And they are well prepared.
“We’ve stood in the face of fire before,” Williams continued. “We feel a responsibility to use the skills we have.”
Jake Pogue, a veteran of the Marines, expressed concerns about possible police tactics in coming days and told the Guardian, “We’re not coming as fighters, but as protectors. Our role in that situation would be to simply form a barrier between water protectors and the police force and try to take some of that abuse for them.”
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This is no ordinary protest — camps at Standing Rock began breaking ground in April last year, and have since become fully-functioning mini-cities. Now, however, water protectors are racing two clocks — the first involves fully cleaning up camps in the floodplain before the spring thaw; and the second, completion of Dakota Access.
In vowing to stay and fight the pipeline, water protectors have loosely complied with requests from the tribe and authorities to evacuate the floodplain — and even attempted to establish a camp on higher ground. But the nascent Last Child Camp nearly immediately fell to police — and 76 were arrested — under the pretense the location was private property.
With authorities, locals, certain leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux, and President Trump’s administration progressively inimical to the #NoDAPL movement, the assistance of veterans will be as welcome now as it was last year.
Much hype surrounded the first group of veterans who came to Standing Rock, but major shortcomings in official leadership led to chaos and confusion — and even stranded a large faction inside a barely-heated gymnasium away from the camp for several days without communication.
Despite lingering bitterness over that deployment, some of the same veterans now plan to return with the same mission — to form a human shield for protectors and absorb the rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, water cannons, or any of the other ostensively less-than-lethal weapons at Morton County’s disposal.
Water protectors have come to expect the worst from law enforcement — offensives by police robbed a Native American woman of her eyesight in one eye, and a non-Native supporter nearly lost her arm when an explosive projectile ripped open flesh to the bone. This barbarism had been darkly par for the course for police.
But now, after Energy Transfer Partners received the green light to continue drilling under Lake Oahe by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week, water protectors find themselves in the precarious position of knowing law enforcement and National Guard troops will likely move to forcefully clear camps and arrest anyone remaining — but not knowing when the move will come nor how brutally they will be treated.
Vets dedicated to guarding the unarmed as they take a last stand also know this — but their very presence creates a political nightmare.
After all, if live ammunition is fired by police and National Guard against unarmed water protectors and U.S. military veterans on land rightfully belonging to Native Americans via several treaties, the fallout would be rightly insurmountable for those in charge.
“This historical trauma of indigenous communities in this country is very real. It’s tragic,” Crane explained. “The military has a lot of the same problems.”
In telling ways, Indigenous water protectors facing government-initiated violence echoes through an unbroken history — one in which Native American lives have been devalued in the eyes of politicians and corporate elite, who quantify — rather than treasure — the geography of this land.
Veterans — many of whom have also been devalued by the government upon return from duty — relate particularly well to the traumas suffered at Standing Rock. Water protectors who haven’t directly been impacted by brutal policing have likely either seen it happen, or know someone who has been injured — and many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder because of this.
“We are able to talk about PTSD,” said Mescalero Apache Tribe member, Aubree Peckham, of the intense bonding between Indigenous protectors and veterans. “And they finally feel like they are understood.”
Some of the vets see protecting the camps as atonement for fighting in wars they later learned had far more to do with natural resources or the whims of politicians and corporations than anything remotely pertaining to freedom.
“This is the right war, right side,” Vietnam veteran Dan Luker explained to the Guardian. “Finally, it’s the US military coming on to Sioux land to help, for the first time in history, instead of coming on to Sioux land to kill natives.”
Portsmouth, OH — An intense video uploaded to Facebook this week is beginning to go viral as it shows a Portsmouth police officer choking an EMT.
The video, which was taken Saturday night outside of a Portsmouth bar, shows what happens when a police officer has his authority questioned. Predictably, the police department is claiming that the video doesn’t show everything that happened. However, multiple eye-witnesses have come forward and have told their versions — they are all the same.
The video, like most videos, actually does not show 100 percent of what happened. However, according to those who watched the situation unfold, in person, there is no question as to what happened.
According to police and witnesses, a fight had broken out in front of a bar in downtown Portsmouth last Saturday night. Police and EMS responded and the EMT began treating a man who’d was bleeding and knocked unconscious.
While the EMT was prepping the man for a trip in the ambulance, the man regained consciousness and was naturally startled.
“He just woke up from being knocked out, and he’s got guys all around him grabbing a hold of him,” Trevor Conley, one of many witnesses said. “You’re going to freak out.”
Instead of calming the man down, as the EMT was trying to do, police rushed over and began tasering the man. At this point, acting out of concern for the man’s life, the EMT questioned the officer’s choice to taser a man who was bleeding and unconscious and tried to prevent it. However, he was swiftly met with police violence of his own.
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“The EMT said, ‘You can’t be tasing this guy, he’s bleeding, got head problems,’ ” Josh Journey, another witness said. “Then after that, he grabbed the EMT, took him across the street, and I saw him have his hand on his throat all the way across the road and had him up against that cruiser.”
“When the EMT was telling him ‘you can’t do that, you can’t do that, he’s got head trauma,’ he grabbed him up here,” Chad Bennett said, who also witnessed the incident first hand, as he gestured around his neck.
At this point, Journey says that’s when he started recording. Journey’s video is clear and shows the officer holding the EMT by his throat against the police cruiser — allegedly for the act of questioning his authority.
But this cop’s anger wasn’t over yet. After he attacked the EMT, he turned his attention to the people who just documented the attack.
“He saw us with our phones out,” Journey said. “That’s when he came across the street at us and was pretty hostile.”
In an apparent fit of rage, the officer verbally berates the witnesses and attempted to confiscate their phones. However, he was unsuccessful.
“I think they realized that they’d messed up,” Journey said.
“He could’ve handled it a little better,” Conley said. “I know the situation was crazy.”
According to the Portsmouth police chief, the case is under administrative review which is expected to be completed by Wednesday.
Oddly enough, this is not the first time we’ve reported on a cop choking an EMT.
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Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Daniel Martin decided that it would be a good idea to pull over an ambulance for failing to yield to his squad car — never mind the fact that the ambulance had a sick woman in the back, bringing her to the hospital.
Martin became belligerent at the scene when the ambulance drivers wanted to continue on to the hospital and ended up assaulting and arresting driver Maurice White.
Charges were eventually dropped against White, and Martin went on an all expense paid, taxpayer funded vacation.
