News — police brutality
Feature News: In Paris, several police officers have been suspended after filmed beating a Black man
Several police officers in the French capital city of Paris have been suspended and are under investigation after they were filmed brutally assaulting a Black man inside his music studio on November 21. Their suspension was ordered by French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, the Associated Press reported.
Feature News: Philadelphia erupts with violence and looting after police shoot, kill Black man Walter Wallace Jr.
Police and protesters clashed for a second night in Philadelphia following the police shooting death of 27-year-old Black man Walter Wallace Jr. Footage of the shooting shows Wallace being shot at several times by the police on Monday after they yelled at him to drop a knife.
Wallace had a mental health crisis before his killing, and his family had called for an ambulance to seek help for their son, according to their lawyer, Shaka Johnson. The lawyer said the officers were aware of Wallace’s mental health crisis since they had been to the family home on about three occasions before he was shot.
Hundreds of people who gathered in a West Philadelphia park on Tuesday night started marching through the neighborhood in protest of Wallace’s killing. The march turned violent when the group came across some police officers near a police station and started throwing bricks, rocks and light bulbs at them, according to reports. Others looted shops amid reports of arrests in other areas of the city Tuesday around 9 p.m.
During Monday night’s protests, some 30 police officers were injured and about 90 people were arrested. Philadelphia Police Department tweeted, “A large crowd of appx 1000 is looting businesses,” and advised residents to remain indoors as the police and the National Guard were deployed.
Wallace’s family has meanwhile condemned the violence and looting. “Stop this violence and chaos,” Wallace’s father, Walter Wallace Sr., said outside of the family’s home on Tuesday, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “People have businesses. We all got to eat.”
Police commissioner Danielle M. Outlaw said an investigation into the shooting is underway, adding that all issues in the video would be addressed. District Attorney Larry Krasner also released a statement saying his office would conduct a joint investigation of the shooting along with the police department’s Officer-Involved Shooting Investigation Unit.
Police spokesperson Tanya Little said the shooting happened before 4 pm Monday after officers received a call about a man screaming and holding a weapon. Officers arrived at Cobbs Creek, a predominantly Black neighborhood in west Philadelphia where they found Wallace holding a knife, Little said. The officers ordered Wallace to drop the knife; he refused and rather “advanced toward” them, according to Little.
Both officers then fired “several times” at Wallace, who got hit in the shoulder and chest. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital the police drove him to. The officers involved have so far been taken off street duty pending further investigation.
A bystander shot a video of the incident, which was shared on social media by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. Wallace’s death is the latest killing of a Black person by police in the U.S. after months of protests against racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of the death of unarmed man George Floyd.
Feature News: More Nigerian protests against police brutality as reforms fail to convince
Nigerian protesters demanding an end to police brutality returned to the streets on Wednesday, saying they were unconvinced by the creation of a new police unit and a pledge not to use violence against demonstrators.
Protesters have staged daily marches nationwide for a week, calling for an overhaul of police forces. Police have responded to the demonstrations with beatings, tear gas and gunfire, which human rights group Amnesty International said had killed at least 10 people.
The protests have prompted a raft of announcements. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a police unit that demonstrators have long accused of beatings, killings and extortion, was officially disbanded on Sunday.
On Tuesday, police agreed to stop using force against protesters. They also announced the formation of a new unit, the Special Weapons and Tactics team (SWAT), to "fill the gaps" left by the disbanded SARS.
But protesters said on Wednesday they feared the new unit will simply be a rebranded version of SARS.
Hundreds gathered on Wednesday in the capital Abuja, as well as megacity Lagos and Warri -- both in the south -- to press their calls for police reforms.
"What they do is... give them new uniforms, call them a different name, but they are still the same people in these police forces," said blogger Folu Oyefeso, in Lagos.
Demonstrators in Lagos, who gathered despite heavy rain, sang, danced and chanted. Many held placards, including one that read "Stop killing our dreamers. #EndSARS now."
Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in a statement on Wednesday, urged protesters to wind down demonstrations, saying that the gridlock caused in recent days had disrupted businesses still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.
"People are just coming back to businesses. It would be unfair for those businesses not to be able to get back on their feet again," he said.
Feature News: South African police officer arrested over ‘corruption’
A top ranking South African police officer was arrested on Monday over corruption allegations, a government department responsible for investigating complaints against the police said.
The unnamed police commissioner was held in connection with the supply of emergency warning equipment to the police service, according to a statement by the Independent Investigative Directorate.
The contract price for the supply of equipment was Rand 191 million ($11.58 million) but only Rand 65million ($3.9 million) was paid to the service provider, it added.
The senior police officer is accused of aiding and abetting the crime.
Eleven others, including police officers and civilians, have also been arrested in the case. Among those is former commissioner Khomotso Phahlane, who has denied any wrongdoing.
South Africa has intensified its fight against graft in recent past.
Former President Jacob Zuma, who was forced to resign in February 2018, has been summoned to appear before an anti-corruption commission next month.
His successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, has promised to tackle corruption, fraud, and theft of public funds.
Several members of African National Congress, the ruling party of post-apartheid South Africa since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, are also being investigated for alleged financial wrongdoings.
Afro Brazilian News: Brazil Suffers its Own Scourge of Police Brutality
Close to 2 million residents of the Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas are struggling to cope with two lethal threats. The first, Covid-19, affects us all, but is a heightened risk for those who live on cramped streets where social distancing is hard and homes lack decent ventilation, sanitation, and access to potable water. Most favela residents rely on informal jobs and cannot work from home. About 300 residents have died of coronavirus.
The other threat is entirely man-made. In the first four months of 2020, Rio police, by their own count, killed 606 people. In April, as isolation measures came into place, robberies and other crimes dropped dramatically, but police violence surged. Police killed close to six people a day, a 43 percent increase from the same month last year. They were responsible for 35 percent of all killings in Rio de Janeiro state in April.
To put that in perspective, imagine police in the United States killing at a similar rate; they would be responsible for more than 36,000 deaths each year. Instead, US police shoot and kill about 1,000 people per year. That number includes cases where the use of deadly force was excessive and unwarranted, and too often indicative of flagrant discrimination against African-Americans. Some of those cases have led to public protest and unrest, as with the recent killing of George Floyd.
More than three quarters of the close to 9,000 people killed by Rio police in the last decade were black men. Nationwide, police killed more than 33,000 people in the last ten years. There have been some protests, particularly in the communities that suffer the brunt of that violence, but not the uproar seen in the United States.
The numbers alone cannot convey the tragedy. On May 18, three police officers, supposedly pursuing suspects, entered a home in the Salgueiro favela where six unarmed cousins had gathered to play. They opened fire hitting 14-year-old João Pedro Matos Pinto in the back. A relative drove João Pedro to a helicopter used by police in the operation, which took him away. The family spent more than 17 hours not knowing his whereabouts or condition, and finally found João’s body at the coroner´s office.
Three days later, as teachers, students, and other volunteers outside a school in the Providência favela handed out food packages to families left hungry by the economic fallout from Covid-19, the police opened fire. They said they were responding to gunfire from unidentified suspects. They killed Rodrigo Cerqueira, a 19-year-old whose teacher described him as a “wonderful boy” who always sat in the front row in school.
In the May 18 and May 21 operations, the police made no arrests and no officer was injured. The police routinely excuse themselves in killings, saying they opened fire in self-defense. Sometimes, it is true, as they face dangerous gangs. But many times, it is not.
The same rules for the use of lethal force apply in Providência or Salgueiro as in Copacabana and other wealthy Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, but you wouldn’t know it. Human Rights Watch research over more than a decade shows that in poor neighborhoods, police open fire recklessly, without regard for the lives of bystanders. Sometimes they wantonly execute people.
That they only behave so abusively in poor neighborhoods may explain the lack of an uproar over the killings in a society as deeply unequal as Brazil´s.
Police operations resulting in injuries and killings make law-abiding citizens of poor neighborhoods see officers as the enemy and a threat to their children. Such brutality does nothing to dismantle criminal groups. Instead, it feeds a cycle of violence that also puts officers at risk.
Rio de Janeiro state authorities need to draft and put into effect a plan with concrete steps and goals to reduce police killings. And when those killings occur, the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor´s office needs to ensure prompt, thorough, and independent investigations, including by opening its own investigations, in addition to those undertaken by the police.
While Covid-19 will affect favela residents for a long time, effective public health policies can help bring it under control. But as long as officers responsible for reckless shootings and cold-blooded executions are not held accountable, we’ll keep losing innocent young people in Rio de Janeiro, with no end in sight.
Editors note: Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times told investigators he thought he was trying to abduct one of his own children
Rusten Sheskey (pictured), the Kenosha police
officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven
times last month, told investigators he thought
Blake was trying to abduct one of his own children
before he opened fire
The Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times last month told investigators he thought Blake was trying to abduct one of his own children before he opened fire.
Brendan Matthews, the attorney for Officer Rusten Sheskey and the Kenosha police union, offered his client's version of what went down during the August 23 shooting in an interview with CNN published Friday.
Matthews claimed that when Sheskey arrived at the scene in response to a call from a woman who said Blake was at her home and shouldn't be there, he heard a woman say: 'He's got my kid. He's got my keys.'
Sheskey saw Blake put a child in the SUV as he arrived, but he didn't know that two other children were also in the back seat, Matthews said.
He said Sheskey told investigators he opened fire because Blake 'held a knife in his hand and twisted his body toward' the officer, and that he didn't stop shooting until he determined Blake 'no longer posed an imminent threat'.
If Sheskey had allowed Blake to leave and something happened to the child, Matthews said: 'The question would have been: "Why didn't you do something?"'
Scroll down for video
Blake (pictured) was left paralyzed after Sheskey shot
him seven times in the back in front of his three children
on August 23 in Kenosha, Wisconsin
Video showed the moment Sheskey opened fire on Blake as he responded to a call from a woman who claimed Blake shouldn't have been at her home. Sheskey's lawyer said the officer opened fire because Blake turned toward him with a knife
The bystander who recorded the shooting, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell: 'Drop the knife! Drop the knife!' before gunfire erupted. White said he didn't see a knife in Blake's hands.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which is leading the investigation, previously said in a news release that a knife was found in the vehicle, but it didn't say whether Blake had been holding it at any point during the confrontation or whether police knew it was there before Sheskey shot him.
In a statement previously released by Matthews on behalf of the police union, Matthews said Blake was armed with a knife but that officers didn't see it until Blake reached the passenger side of the vehicle.
As Blake opened the driver's door of the SUV, Sheskey pulled on Blake's shirt and then opened fire. Three of Blake's children were in the backseat.
The mother of the three children, who called police that day, filed a complaint against Blake that had led to felony charges being filed in July accusing him of sexually assaulting a woman in May.
Blake, who was wanted on a warrant for those charges when police arrived at the scene August 23, pleaded not guilty to the charges earlier this month via video from from his hospital bed. A trial date was set for November 9.
Sheskey and the other two officers who were at the scene were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
Blake broke his silence for the first time since he was shot in a video from his hospital bed earlier this month (pictured). 'Your life, and not only just your life, your legs, something you need to move around and forward in life, can be taken from you like this, man,' he said
Editors note: Why police violence against Black people persists—and what can be done about it
We hear the call in demonstrations taking place in big cities and small towns across the country: “Say their names!” “George Floyd!”
And then, “Breonna Taylor” in Louisville. And “Rayshard Brooks” in Atlanta.
And Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile, and Eric Garner, and Stephon Clark, and Laquan McDonald. And so many more.
Beyond the individual deaths, the sheer length of the list of Black people killed by police really stuns. It shows that the central questions should be not just what happened to any individual victim, but why did it happen? And why does it keep happening, across the country, year after year?
The two main drivers of this situation are the twin toxins of race and fear.
Race runs through the American psyche in deep ways, all rooted to slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow. Decades ago, research established that the dominant American stereotypes of Black people cast them as criminal, dangerous, and violent. But the past 20 years of work by social psychologists has yielded insights that might help explain why police are quicker to use deadly force in an encounter with a Black person.
It’s now been documented that when people see Black faces, their visual systems process things differently. They become quicker to see (or think they see) weapons, and become more likely to think about crime. Similarly, when scientists prime experimental subjects with suggestions of crime and violence and then show them pictures of groups of people, the subjects’ eyes move automatically to the Black faces. Blackness, the researchers said, operates as a “visual tuning device.”
Similarly, other research shows that when people see Black children, they tend to see them as older, larger, more muscular, and more threatening than white children, uniformly overestimating their age and bulk. For example, the Cleveland officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death fewer than three seconds after driving up next to him described him as approximately 18 years old and 185 pounds.
Add to this the poison of fear—on both sides of any police encounter.
Anyone who speaks with African Americans about police learns that, for most of them, they have either personally experienced or heard repeatedly from family and friends stories of demeaning treatment, physical abuse, guns pulled, or “less than lethal” weapons used on them, often for small matters or nothing at all. Black parents, knowing that a traffic stop can morph into a deadly encounter in a heartbeat, teach their children how to survive these incidents in “the talk” given to every child of color before parents allow them to drive. For some Black Americans, the threat and danger posed by police in even the most routine matters means they hesitate to call the police when most white people would without hesitation.
But why would there be fear on the part of the police? After all, they display bravery and physical courage all the time; as former President Barack Obama said, they are the ones who “run toward the danger.” Most of the rest of us run away.
This is all true. But the presence of bravery does not mean fear disappears. In fact, present day police training and police culture do much to amp up fear among our officers.
From the academy onward, officers learn from trainers, speakers, and veterans that every encounter with a civilian carries the potential for lethal violence. Not just an extremely small percentage of such encounters, as I documented in my book A City Divided, but every one of them. Academy, in-service, and private training heighten the sense of lethal danger by showing recruits and officers countless videos from squad car dashcam recorders of police officers murdered and assaulted. These videos capture events that are (thankfully) exceedingly rare, and could serve as useful training tools concerning tactical mistakes. But the sheer volume of what trainers show them sends a different message: Everywhere, all the time, civilians will try to kill, maim, and assault you.
The response to this has been to cultivate the idea of the warrior officer. The warrior is ready, at all times, to respond to the constant lethal threats, present everywhere, with righteous violence. It’s a war; we are the soldiers.
It is no wonder that when the police perceive a threat, they often respond with violence; it is also not surprising that sometimes, even if the officer’s fear was real, the threat was not. This helps to explain why, in my years of research on police conduct and use of force, the phrase “I was in fear for my life” comes up so often in cases in which police shoot people who turn out to possess no weapons.
There are ways we can move forward from this dangerous, tragic state of affairs and create an environment of real public safety that actually serves and protects everyone.
First, don’t abolish the police. Instead, unbundle what tasks police now do, and ask which of those tasks actually need a police response. A report of a gunfight? Yes. A person in mental health crisis, or an issue with a homeless person or a drug overdose? Mobile units of other professionals, like social workers or mental health counselors, should come to the scene. Not just the funding, but the responsibility, for these issues should be taken from police and given to others more suited.
Second, we must have greater accountability for police misconduct, and transparency about misconduct’s consequences. Police departments are like many other organizations: A small percentage of workers cause a large percentage of the problems. The problem is not, or not only, those “bad apples”; it’s the apple barrel—the department as a whole—that tolerates them and allows them to remain, tainting the entire organization and rotting its culture.
Third, if union contracts make it too difficult to get rid of those who don’t belong in uniform, that is the fault of not just the unions but the cities and political leaders that negotiated those agreements. Those agreements must change.
Fourth, use of force law must change. The U.S. Supreme Court and some state laws set the bar far too low, allowing more use of force, even deadly force, than is necessary. This can be done through changes in state law, and even by policy in individual departments.
Unless we are willing to look beyond individual cases, to ask why we keep hearing about unnecessary deaths at police hands, all we’ll get are more names to add to our already horrifying long list. And no one wants that.
David A. Harris is Semenko chair at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, author of A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law in Police Confrontations, and host of the Criminal Injustice podcast.