WATCH: Boy Speaks Out About Being Attacked by Police for Being Autistic

After Body Camera footage was released that showed a 14-year-old boy with autism being assaulted by police in Arizona, his story went viral, and the public was reminded that individuals with disabilities are often targeted by police, no matter their race, age or gender.

As The Free Thought Project reported, Grossman took the boy, Connor Leibel to the ground after attempting to place the 14-year-old in handcuffs, arguably for being “jumpy”—as many autistic individuals are. Grossman claimed that because Leibel was “stimming,” or playing with a string to help calm his nerves, that the young man must have been under the influence of some sort of drug and this gave him reasonable suspicion to act in the manner that he did.

Grossman, reportedly a drug recognition expert, could not tell the difference between an autistic individual and someone who is on drugs. Now, Connor is speaking out about his frightful interaction. He told AZFamily in Phoenix:

“He pushed me down on the grass and he just hit me on the tree and tackled me and then he didn’t stop, It made me feel sad.”

As the video, which has now gone viral, demonstrates, Leibel was minding his own business on the corner of a city park when he was approached by the officer. Reporters at a press conference with the Buckeye PD, asked how a reported drug recognition expert couldn’t tell the difference between a drug user and a person with special needs.

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Connor’s mother, Diane Leibel, can hardly watch the bodycam footage, which has now been made public. “It was really hard to watch that, that’s my, that’s my baby,” she told AZFamily.

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Tamela Skaggs, spokesperson for the Buckey Police Department made a statement on behalf of their officer as well as the department:

“I hope the family sees that we will learn from this incident. We are human and things are constantly evolving and changing and it’s almost impossible to know and understand every single little piece of every single disorder.”

Grossman was cleared of any wrongdoing in the violent takedown that left Connor cut, bruised, scraped and emotionally traumatized. The department also claimed there was “no use of force” implemented in the contact with the autistic child. One might be hard-pressed to find very many who would agree with the department’s explanation or resulting investigation.

In fact, Danielle (Conor’s mom) seems perplexed by Skagg’s comments, and she said they are conflicting.

“They say nothing was wrong, he (Grossman) didn’t do anything wrong, but ‘we’re going to make sure we handle it differently.’ Why would you need to ‘handle it differently’ if everything was done correctly the first time,” Danielle Liebel said.

The interaction with Grossman, the resulting takedown of a young teenage boy with special needs, and the head in the sand denial by the police department has left many people scratching their heads in bewilderment, wondering how an autistic boy can be violently assault, and how the officer’s actions can be justified by the police department.

As TFTP has consistently and faithfully reported, few police departments will every acknowledge responsibility, yet they are in the business of keeping citizens accountable for their actions. All of which has led many to conclude there’s a double standard at work for police.

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Flipping the script may help the average police apologist understand why so many are outraged. If Grossman had been standing on a street corner, and Leibel had approached him, attempted to place him in handcuffs, and then thrown him to the ground when the officer pulled away, the young autistic boy would more than likely be facing assault charges. That is, of course, if he lived through the beat down Grossman and his fellow officers would dish out for laying a hand on a boy in blue.

Connor now knows the difference between an officer he can trust and one like Grossman, who injured him. “A different kind of police officer makes me feel happy…The one police officer was mean to me and made me feel sad…He pushed me down on the grass and he just hit me on the tree and tackled me and then he didn’t stop. It made me feel sad,” He said.

Now, Connor Leibel’s family has stated they only wants three things: They want a personal apology from Buckeye police officer David Grossman, they want him to help serve the autistic community, and they want the entire department to receive training on how to deal with autistic individuals.

However, in true obstinate fashion, the police department has acknowledged receipt of the requests but said they can’t say when, if at all, they will even respond.

WATCH: Police Publicly Execute Schizophrenic Man for Holding a Stick

Madeira, CA — On Friday, another man lost his life in a hail of police bullets. Madeira, CA Police shot and killed 32-year-old Sergio Valdovinos, a mentally ill man who police says was swinging at them with a large stick.

Valdovinos was known to police. They’d been out to his home before. In fact, they’d responded to his home on at least 50 occasions over the last two years. He was mentally ill and reportedly suffered from schizophrenia.

For years, his mother had attempted to get him help, to no avail. Surely his condition was wearing on her, as well as the community who lived in adjacent homes. But neither his medical condition nor the frequent police calls to the home were any reason for law enforcement to kill him, according to critics within Valdovinos’ family.

Video from the SWAT team entry was recorded by a neighbor. It shows the team, in line formation, turning the corner around the garage, and engaging the young mentally ill man on his front porch.

After commands were given and apparently ignored, police opened fire, killing Valdovinos with eight quick shots. It was over. No more would his mother be terrorized by his supposed irrational, impulsive behaviors. No longer would the community have to worry about the schizophrenic man down the road. But questions remain.

Could the police have ended the situation without killing him? Could they have disarmed him without using deadly force? For answers to that question, KMPH News reporters spoke with Madeira Police Chief Steven Frazier. He told them;

This is not what a Madera Police Department wants to happen.

The chief displayed a table with a large stick, screwdrivers, and a makeshift “shield” that was made with a griddle which was reportedly taken off of his person before police shot and killed him.

We’ve been out there before where he’s threatening us with machetes, knives.

Chief Frazier indicated he was a dangerous person, having once set his garage on fire.

Sergio began swinging the stick at our officers. The officer that was closest to him ended up firing eight rounds to defend himself from getting struck by the stick.

When asked if the level of force was appropriate, the chief responded by saying his team had to neutralize the “threat” and that there was little time to contemplate whether the force was excessive. He said:

We need to use a level that stops that threat. How many shots that takes? I don’t know. There’s so many factors that come into play. From the time that you start pulling the trigger, to the time he falls, by the time your brain catches up with that, you could have fired three or four more rounds just because you knew you had to…Eight rounds sounds like a lot. I don’t think that’s excessive at this point.

Unfortunately, the keywords we often hear at TFTP are: “in fear for my life” and “stop the threat,” all of which begs the question of whether a taser should have been deployed. After all, the man was suffering from a mental illness.

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The chief responded to the suggestion a taser should have been used by saying, “the opportunity did not present itself.”

But other officers have been faced with equally terrifying situations and created space and opportunity sufficient enough to deploy a taser. In one such instance, a man who was either schizophrenic or on a drug such as “bath salts” or “PCP,” took all his clothes off and laid down in a busy city street.

When one solitary officer arrived on the scene, the crazed man got up from the ground and quickly walked toward the officer in a threatening manner. Instead of drawing his service pistol, which he could have deployed with justification, he chose his taser, and dropped the man like a bag of bricks.

So how is it a team of SWAT team members could not have done the same? Maybe they’re not trained to de-escalate. And therein may lie the problem. Police need better training to deal with mentally ill, and de-escalate dangerous situations.

WATCH: Dept Retrained How NOT to Kill and It’s Working — Cops Kill No One Since 2015

Salt Lake City, UT — It’s a tale of two Michael Brown’s, one a police chief for Salt Lake City, the other deceased, killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson. Salt Lake City Police Chief Michael Brown decided his town had seen enough officer-involved shootings and retrained his officers in de-escalation of force techniques.

“Can I shot this guy,” Wilson asked himself as Brown was allegedly punching him through his cruiser’s window. Wilson went on to shoot and kill the unarmed Michael Brown, a shooting which touched off grassroots protests throughout the country objecting to police brutality and the escalation of force implemented by nearly all of the nation’s police forces.

And while Chief Brown knows there are times when police can and should take someone’s life, it appears now his department wants that decision to be the last resort. “People don’t call us when they’re having the best day of their life. They call us when they’re having a crisis,” Brown said.

The Salt Lake City PD is proud of their new de-escalation program, even offering officers incentives and awards for deescalating encounters with citizens. One such encounter was captured on video, and Brown says there have been 37 such instances since the program was enacted in 2016.

Chief Brown stated, “The Salt Lake City Police Department is probably one of the leading agencies in the country as far as how we train and deploy and use these tactics to de-escalate and save lives.” But it hasn’t always been that way.

As TFTP’s Matt Agorist explained in 2014, the state of Utah had an epidemic of officer-involved shootings. Agorist wrote, “deadly force by police surpassed even violence between spouses and dating partners.”

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That was then. This is now. To date, there have not been any fatal officer-involved shootings in Salt Lake City since 2015.

The de-escalation techniques used by Salt Lake City PD involve variations in voice commands, backing away to provide space between cop and suspect, and switching to less than lethal methods before resorting to deadly force.

One encounter captured on video highlights their achievements. An officer pulled over a motorist who promptly exited the vehicle carrying a knife and moving in the direction of the officer who started first with his voice commands.

“I’m not gonna do this, I’m not gonna do it. Don’t make me do it,” the officer screamed at the man. “Get back in the car, it’s not worth it,” he said yelling also, “it’s a freakin ticket!”

The officer switched to his taser, and then tased the man he could have justifiably shot and possibly killed with his handgun. The entire incident made his chief very proud.

“It’s amazing to see the training go into effect,” Brown said adding he gave his officer, “a big hug. I told him ‘nice work. I think he saved a life.”

Salt Lake City’s police department, led by Michael Brown, is setting the example for how police departments can use common-sense de-escalation techniques to subdue citizens, many of whom are having their worst day.

Those measures are the ones TFTP has been calling for since our inception. It’s nice to see, in light of over 1,000 deaths by cop each year, one department is now taking their jobs very seriously attempting to protect and serve rather than punish and kill.

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For those that don’t recall, Dillon Taylor was one of the cases which highlighted the serious need of SLC cops to be retrained.

On August 11, 2014, Taylor was gunned down in broad daylight by Officer Bron Cruz.

The confrontation happened because Cruz confused Taylor with a possible criminal in the area.

Taylor, his brother, and his cousin were exiting a 7-Eleven in an area where police were searching for a suspect who had allegedly been waving a gun around. These uninvolved young men allegedly matched the description.

When the three men exited the convenience store they were surrounded by officers and ordered to show their hands. Two of the men stopped and complied, Dillon Taylor, listening to music, kept walking.

Barely 40 seconds go by from the time Dillon is approached until he is shot by Cruz.

“He couldn’t hear them, so he just kept walking. Then … they had guns pointed at his face. That’s when he turned off the music,” Taylor’s brother Jerrail Taylor told the SLC Tribune. “I saw them point guns at my brother’s face, and I knew what was going to happen.”

One officer told Taylor to get on the ground, while another told him to put his hands on his head.

“He got confused, he went to pull up his pants to get on the ground, and they shot him,” Jerrail Taylor said.

Officer Cruz was never held accountable.

Cop’s Body Cam Catches Him Sadistically Tase Homeless Man While He Was Surrendering

It used to be considered “fighting dirty” if you kicked a man while he was down. But those gentleman’s rules don’t apply to police officers, apparently, when it comes to resolving conflict with the homeless. They’re already down on their luck, many of them, and the very people they trust to keep the peace are often the ones who treat them worst. The latest example of how one can get legally assaulted by the police comes from Denver, Colorado.

The incident wouldn’t have been provable without the offending officer’s body camera. But that’s all we’re able to thank him for. The incident occurred 6/3/16 when police responded to reports of a fight in progress and arrived on the scene to find homeless resident Greg Heard (reportedly fighting with another resident), hiding behind a bush near a property wall. Officers Greg Dulayev and Adrian Enriquez approached Heard.

Dulayev can be heard saying, “Hands up!…Crawl out on your hands and knees. I’ll f___ing tase you.” It wasn’t a “Crawl out on your hands and knees, OR I’ll f____ing tase you.” It appears from

It appears from Dulayev’s own words he already had every intention of deploying his less than lethal device on Heard. Whether or not Heard was guilty of a domestic disturbance is irrelevant. For a White man to demand that a Black man crawl on his hands and knees while at his feet, is humiliating enough. But, when Heard appeared to attempt to reason with the officers, he was immediately tased without any further talk.

Heard’s lawyer John Holland is seeking damages to the tune of $750,000 dollars and preemptively released the body camera footage to the public to be able to draw their own conclusions. Holland is releasing the video because as he says, “it’s a matter of public concern. It should be out there, so people can understand that they should be very, very careful when confronting police officers armed with tasers. Because they will be tased — and many people have died from tasing. It can be deadly.”

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Adding what some could say is insult to injury, officer Dulayev asked Heard, “Why’d you do that man? All I asked you to do was come out.” Okay officer. From what we could see and hear (the audio wasn’t running in the seconds leading up to the actual tasing) he was complying with your commands to come out and put his hands up. And his “no, no” wasn’t an, “I’m going to fight you” as much as it was a “hear me out officer and let me explain what’s going on”, at least from one journalists’ perspective. But you lied to Mr. Heard when you told him all you wanted was for him to exit from behind the bush. On the contrary, you told him to come crawling out on his hands and knees and that you’d tase him. And that’s precisely what you did. You tased a man who was trying to reason with you. Once again, the 100 percent compliance policy is going to cost the city and the police department, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars because you wouldn’t hear the man out. Nice work! You’ll probably get a commendation.

This is precisely the types of incidents that The Free Thought Project has faithfully covered; seemingly harmless encounters with police which often end with either someone having electrified fishing hooks being shot into their torso, or worse. All too often, police officers revert to their weapons instead of their wisdom by asking themselves, “how best can I handle this situation?”

Officer Dulayev discussed the incident with Heard again asking the homeless man who was already in tears saying his parents were dead, he’s poor, and that he’s already been to prison twice. Dulayev said, “When you come at me like that. I told you to stop with your hands up. You kept coming,” he said defending his actions. Well, part of what you said officer Dulayev, was correct. You did tell him to come out with his hands up, and as he was still walking out from under the bushes, you tased him, without really giving him a chance to speak with you about what was going on. Of course, that conclusion is a bit subjective. Others may see a man who was already angry, is combative, and not following police officers’ commands. For his part, Heard said he deserved to go to jail, supposedly because of his actions in the fight, but he protested being tased.

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When paramedics and/or firemen arrived on the scene, he told them Heard “charged” at him. We’re not sure which body camera footage would show Heard charging the officer. From the one we saw taken from his own body cam, it doesn’t appear at all that Heard was charging anyone. It’s also unclear what he would have done to the officer had he gotten much closer. Only Heard knows what he was going to do after getting the officer’s attention. Maybe he would have attacked him. We don’t necessarily think so. But one thing’s for certain. He didn’t charge officer Dulayev.

Heard admitted to officer Enriquez that he’d been drinking and using crack cocaine earlier in the day but said he had submitted to officer Dulayev’s commands and was being compliant when he was tased. We, at The Free Thought Project, understand that the taser brought an end to Mr. Heard being perceived as a threat, allowed the police officers to handcuff the suspect, and subdued him. However, we just simply believe there’s a better way to deal with the public than demanding 100 percent instantaneous compliance with officer commands with every encounter or else they can be “f___ing tased”.

Holland (Heard’s lawyer) opined about the police officer’s use of deadly force and discussed his client’s case;

We made a demand to the city and said, ‘What are you doing with this? The net effect is, you didn’t give him a chance to surrender. He was in mid-step. You didn’t let him finish the step when you gave him the warning and then you tased him’…You can see his eyes looking right in the camera, and he looks friendly. His hands are down. He’s obviously unarmed and he looks like he’s giving up. He was under the bushes, and he has to get out, but he’s doing what he’s supposed to do. Then he gets tased, which is mean-spirited and unjustified, and the officer starts saying, ‘Stop resisting,’ which he’s not doing at all. At that point, his head is down on the ground and he’s semi-paralyzed. His arms are trapped underneath his body. They had to pull them out in order to handcuff him. His face is in the dirt, he isn’t jumping or flailing, his feet aren’t moving. He’s hurting and says he’s having trouble breathing, and the officer tells him that he can’t be short of breath because he’s talking. But just because you’re short of breath doesn’t mean you can’t talk.”

The attorney also spoke to the need for law enforcement to build trust. “We’ve talked to the city, and they’re not interested in resolving it without a lawsuit. So we’re in the process of bringing a suit — and we think this society needs to continue to think very hard about the police’s use of force. If we’re ever to rebuild the relationship that people on both sides claim they want, it’s going to require police to be much more respectful of citizens’ rights and not always pretend that abuses of power like this are just or justifiable. Just because you get stopped by a policeman doesn’t mean you get to be injured, and I’m afraid the law is heading in that direction — toward allowing injuries at will. People beware,” he said.

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What do you believe? Did Heard “charge” officer Dulayev? Was he a threat? Did the officer do the right thing or was there something more he could have done? Is 100 percent compliance with police officers’ commands even attainable? Please share your thoughts below.