Deaths and Injuries in Police Custody

[Andrea]

Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article159117354.html

Thank you to my friends and people throughout the country who have reached out to show support in the wake of my potentially tragic encounter with Knoxville Officer Matthew Janish. I also thank Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch for coming to Charlotte to explain the decision not to discipline Officer Janish and answer my questions. I am disappointed, but not surprised. The system is broken.

On May 3, I was confronted at gunpoint by Officer Janish while I was putting a license plate on an SUV that I purchased from his mother-in-law the previous week. The incident occurred in her driveway, which is across the street from Officer Janish’s home. Janish, who was off-duty, thought I was stealing the truck. After investigating, Knoxville Police determined that Officer Janish’s actions were “lawful and proper.”

My case is another example of how the system is broken. Although my encounter didn’t end tragically, it could have, as all too many have (Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Michael Brown and others), and his actions likely would have still been deemed “lawful and proper.”

The system is designed to exonerate police officers, not provide justice for their victims. My incident, however, gives me new insight into just how much the law values police lives over the citizens they are supposed to protect.

Chief Rausch said that when investigating complaints, it is essential to understand an officer’s mindset to determine the facts. A mindset is not a fact.

Knoxville Police are looking into an officer’s actions after a Charlotte woman said the off-duty officer pulled a gun on her as she changed a license plate on her newly purchased SUV. Tonya Jameson, 45, is a former Charlotte Observer reporter and columnist.

Here are the facts that Janish appeared to focus on – the unmarked cab, a black person, the duffel bag and the license plate.

Then here are other facts that he ignored – he knew his mother-in-law was selling the car, it was broad daylight, and I knew her first name, but not her last name. I offered to show him the keys, registration and bill of sale signed by his mother-in-law.

Those are the actual facts. Officer Janish’s mindset was the scenario he created in his head. His fears weren’t facts.

The moment I arrived at Officer Janish’s mother-in-law’s house I became a suspect, and under the law, it seems that Officer Janish became a victim. He could have stayed at his house, called 911 and waited for the sheriff’s department to arrive. Instead he grabbed his weapon and came outside to confront me.

Had I not reacted calmly, Officer Janish likely would have been within his legal rights to shoot me although I wasn’t doing anything illegal. My mere presence with a duffel bag was deemed a threat.

In her statement, Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero talked about the extensive training officers receive in appropriate use of force and de-escalation. Asking common-sense questions, before unholstering a weapon, should also be included in police training.

I’m sure the situation looked questionable from Officer Janish’s house, but it warranted the question “what are you doing?” That’s exercising common sense. That’s de-escalation.

During his visit, Chief Rausch talked about lessons learned. I didn’t overreact. I didn’t get angry. So, I survived. He said my behavior is how everyone should act in those situations – comply, survive and complain later. But, it’s not natural to be accused of doing something wrong and not prove your innocence.

I wanted to show him the keys or reach into my bag for the registration and bill of sale. I fought every impulse to do anything that would make him feel threatened. I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one expected to remain calm.

It seems that the legal system is really asking civilians to de-escalate adrenaline-fueled cops. We must remain calm while facing a loaded gun while the trained officers can panic and overreact.

What about our lives? Who protects us from the people who are supposed to protect us?

[Andrea]

Update: Audio Interview Confirms Dejuan Guillory Was Unarmed, Lying on The Ground When a Cop Shot Him In The Back

http://www.theroot.com/dejuan-guillory-was-unarmed-lying-on-the-ground-when-a-1796731246

Update: Saturday, July 8, 2017, 11:49 p.m. EST- A new interview sheds light on the Mamou, La., death of Dejuan Guillory. The interview is with Joe Long, the attorney for DeQuince Brown, who witnessed an Evangeline Parish Sherriff Deputy shoot Guillory in the back on July 6, killing him.

Pen Point News investigative reporter Daniel Banguell’s interview with Long confirms many of the details reported earlier. Brown has been unable to tell her side of the story, as she has been in jail with charges of attempted first-degree murder of a police officer since the incident.

In the recording, Long affirms that Guillory was on the ground with his hands behind his back, begging for his life, pleading, “please don’t shoot me, I have three kids,” when Paul Lafleur first shot Guillory. Long states:

“They were both on the ground. Guillory was on the ground, on his belly, his hands behind his back, and the officer had a gun trained at Guillory’s back, maybe a foot or two from Guillory’s body. They were still arguing back and forth but Guillory was on the ground as directed. His hands were behind his back. He was not resisting. All of a sudden, a shot rang out.”

According to Long, DeQuince Brown then jumped on the officer’s back to prevent him from killing her boyfriend and bit LaFleur (hence the reported injuries to the officer). LaFluer then fired three more shots at Guillory.

Long also states that two ambulances came to the scene, but “One ambulance loaded the deputy in and took him to the hospital. The other one left empty. When she left in a police car, Guillory’s body was still on the gravel road.” When asked if anyone treated Guillory, the attorney added, “As far as she knows, she never witnessed anybody attempt CPR for Guillory. It may have happened, but she didn’t see it.”

Earlier: Dejuan Guillory was 27-years-old. Everyone who knows him calls him sweet, hard-working and charming. Everyone who ever laid eyes on him objectively says he was good looking. He loved his children. He had a troubled past that he put behind him, but he had a promising future as a concrete contractor.

So, when a sheriff’s deputy stood over Guillory in an isolated road in the backwoods of Louisiana, fired multiple shots into his back and left him there to die, he didn’t kill DeJuan, he transformed him. Before Guillory took his last breath on a dusty, Southern road just outside of the tiny town of Mamou, La., he was a man with a future moving away from his past. He was a loving father, a smile and promise.

Now, Dejuan Guillory is just dead.

As soon as he was served death through the barrel of an infallible police officer’s gun, Guillory was changed. First he became a “suspect.” Then they made him into a thug. Soon he will be a villain. Then a martyr. Then a hashtag. Then attorneys and a judge in a courtroom somewhere will refer to him as “the deceased” before he eventually disappears into the ether like the bullet-riddled dark-skinned bodies before him—just another dead, black thing.
Dejuan Guillory and DeQuince Brown

But on the morning of July 6, DeJuan Guillory was alive. According to his family members, Guillory had just been paid for two concrete jobs and wanted to do something with his new girlfriend—DeQuince Erin Brown. Guillory decided they would hop on his all-terrain vehicle and go recreational frog hunting, called “frogging” in Southwest Louisiana.

Brown says through the Guillory family’s attorney Pride Doran in an exclusive interview with The Root, that the couple was on the ATV on Chad Lane when they happened upon a parked vehicle. The car flashed its lights, stopping the couple, and out stepped Paul Holden LaFleur, a deputy with the Evangeline Parish Sherrif’s Department.

There are several questions as to why LaFleur was parked in the middle of nowhere at 4 a.m. in the morning. The police department says he was answering a burglary call. It is unclear whether LaFleur was on duty, in police uniform or even in a marked car, but both Guillory and his girlfriend recognized LaFleur as an officer. The officer allegedly asked both parties for identification and when they objected, LaFleur ordered them off the four-wheeler. Doran says that Guillory and the officer got into a heated argument and after a brief altercation, LaFleur told Brown and Guillory to get on the ground.

According to Doran, who represents Guillory’s family, both Brown and Guillory complied, but when Guillory was prostrate on the ground, LaFluer reportedly fired his weapon multiple times at Guillory, shooting Guillory three or four times.

In.

His.

Back.

But of course, LaFleur did as he was trained and immediately called for backup and medical care, right?

Nope.

Doran told The Root that the deputy went back to his car and stayed there for an extended period of time. However, during their altercation, LaFleur happened to drop his police radio, and it was Brown who called for help, using LaFleur’s radio.

Then, like so many unarmed black men before him did during police encounters, Dejuan Guillory lay down and died.

Thus began the transformation of Dejuan Guillory.

It started immediately. LaFleur said he was attacked, so DeQuince Brown was arrested on attempted first-degree attempted murder of a police officer. Then the police announced that LaFleur (who was parked on a dirt road at 4:10 a.m. with his lights off) was in the area answering a burglary call (even though no one in the area knew of such a burglary).

You could see it happening. The Acadiana Advocate kicked it off by calling it an “officer-involved shooting.” Dequince Brown was no longer a girlifrend out frogging with her boyfriend, she was now an attempted murderer. But that wasn’t enough, so The Daily Advertiser dug into Guillory’s past and reported it this way:

It’s unclear why Guillory wasn’t in jail since he was sentenced in December by 13th Judicial District Court Judge Gary Ortego to 10 years in jail, with all but five years suspended, according to documents with the Evangeline Parish Clerk of Court Office.

Guillory was arrested in August 2015 after he allegedly stole an ATM from Citizen’s Bank using a backhoe, according to news reports at the time.

See how it works? Guillory was supposed to be in jail, according to them. But even now that they had successfully turned the corpse into a criminal, they were not yet done. They then made him into a suspect. Here is a sample of the headlines:
Burglary suspect killed, deputy wounded in Mamou shooting

An Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s deputy was wounded and a burglary was suspected was killed in a…

Suspect killed in deputy-involved shooting identified

To be clear, Dejuan Guillory was never questioned about a burglary. DeQuince Brown’s charges do not include burglary charges. She has been in jail for 48 hours and no law enforcement official has asked her about a burglary.

Apparently they believe Brown hopped on an ATV before dawn and drove down a country road with the “specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm upon a fireman, peace officer, or civilian employee of the Louisiana State Police Crime Laboratory or any other forensic laboratory engaged in the performance of his lawful duties, or when the specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm is directly related to the victim’s status as a fireman, peace officer, or civilian employee.”

Brown and Guillory have now been mysteriously transformed before our eyes. This is the prestidigitation that magically metamorphosizes black boys into thugs, black women into miscreants and black bodies into cadavers.

That is what Dejuan Guillory has become—a lifeless afterthought in a small-town newspaper. A mythical, scoundrel supercriminal who can overpower armed cops while lying on the ground.

Or, as Paul LaFluer intended—just a dead, black thing.

[Andrea]

Caught On Camera: Police Officer Push Woman Out Of Her Wheelchair!

http://www.thegrandreport.com/caught-camera-police-officer-push-woman-wheelchair/

Andrea: Click link to see video

[Andrea]

Black Teen ‘Mistaken’ for Larger, Bald Black Man Says Police in Calif. Drew Gun on Her, Punched Her in the Mouth

http://www.theroot.com/black-teenager-mistaken-for-larger-bald-black-man-says-1796840022

A black 19-year-old woman says she was confronted by police at gunpoint, punched in the mouth and bitten by a police dog after Bakersfield, Calif., police apparently mistook her for a much larger, bald black man who was suspected of threatening people with a machete at a nearby grocery store.

According to the Bakersfield Californian, Tatyana Hargrove’s story is picking up more and more attention since the NAACP in Bakersfield posted a video to its Facebook page of her sharing her story. That video, in which Hargrove insists that race played a role in the brutal encounter, has gotten 3.8 million views so far.

In the video, the 19-year-old is holding crutches and close-ups are shown of the scratches, bites and other bruises on her body and face that were suffered during the June 18 encounter with Bakersfield police.

Hargrove explained in the video that she had ridden her bicycle to a local store to buy a Father’s Day gift before realizing the establishment was closed. On her way back home, she stopped to get a drink of water out of her backpack. That’s when she noticed three police cars behind her. The teen said one of the officers already had his gun drawn by the time he got out of his patrol car.

The teen said that officers demanded to see her backpack, but she asked them for a warrant. When officers pointed out their K9 dog to her, Hargrove said she got scared and gave them her backpack, but that at that point the officer grabbed her by the wrist and neck and punched her and threw her on the ground. At that point, she said, the K9 dog bit her.

Hargrove says one officer put his knee in her back and another knee on her head.

“I told him ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ and then I started yelling out, ‘Somebody help, somebody help me, they’re gonna kill me!’” she said.

Ultimately, the teen was arrested on suspicion of resisting or delaying an officer and aggravated assault on an officer.

Bakersfield police say they mistook the 5-foot-2, 115-pound Hargrove, age 19, for a suspect who was described as being a 25- to 30-year-old bald man with a goatee, who stands at around 5 foot 10 and weighs 170 pounds.

Hargrove, arresting Officer Christopher Moore wrote in a report, “appeared to be a male and matched the description of the suspect that had brandished a machete and was also within the same complex the suspect had fled to.”

Moore accused Hargrove of ignoring police commands and putting her feet on her bike pedals, appearing as if “she was going to flee.”

At no point does the report say that Hargrove actually left the scene.

Moore said that as another officer, identified as G. Vasquez, was handcuffing the teen, she spun her left shoulder into him, knocking Vasquez off balance and taking him to the ground. Hargrove, police say, fell on top of Vasquez and then spun around into a “mounting position.” That was when Vasquez punched her in the mouth, according to the report.

Moore said at that point he realized Hargrove was within reach of her backpack, in which Moore still apparently suspected held a machete, causing him to release his K9.

Right ...

Moore said he didn’t realize Hargrove was a woman until she told him her first name, “Tatyana.”

“Don’t lie to me, that’s a girl’s name. What is your name?” Moore asked.

“I’m a girl. I just don’t dress like one,” she said.

The actual suspect police were looking for, 24-year-old Douglas Washington, was arrested the next day and remains in jail.

[Andrea]

Video shows man caught in bite by SDPD K9
Andrea: Video shows handcuffed, down on the ground black man being bitten by K9 police unable to control

[Andrea]

Video shows police officer beating homeless woman

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/11/us/georgia-police-beating/index.html

A police department in Georgia has reopened an internal investigation after a cellphone video surfaced showing a DeKalb County police officer striking a homeless woman with his baton several times during an arrest.

The incident occurred at a gas station station in Decatur on June 4. The officer had gone to the Chevron in response to a complaint about the woman begging for money from customers.

The video posted on YouTube doesn't show what led to the incident.

It starts with a tense scene in which the woman, identified as Katie McCrary in a police report, is on the floor as a male police officer beats her with his baton. The officer had filed a Use of Force report after the incident and had been cleared following an internal affairs investigation.

In light of the new cellphone video, the DeKalb County Police Department said in a statement Monday: "Now that the Department has this new evidence we have reopened the investigation and will determine whether the incident is consistent with policy and the law."

The incident marks another controversy that has risen over the scrutiny of police tactics.

The identity of the police officer in the Decatur incident hasn't been released.

In his incident report dated June 5, the police officer said, when he arrived at the gas station, McCrary "attempted to push me out of the way and walk out of the door."

McCrary allegedly tried to walk past the officer again and told him she was a federal agent, according to his incident report. More words were exchanged and McCrary "reached out and grabbed my badge," and after being warned not to touch him, she "grabbed my vest and radio," according to his incident report. He said he used his baton on her legs, forearms and "one strike inadvertently struck the side of her head as she was moving around."

The cellphone video starts with McCrary lying on the floor with her arms and legs in the air as she attempts to kick at the officer who is standing. He swats her multiple times with his baton.

"Hey, Katie. Stop resisting!" yells an unknown man in the store. "Stop resisting."

The officer strikes her several more times as the woman squirms on the ground.

At one point, he places the baton on the back of her neck and pins her down with his knee on her back. When she grabs his baton, he says twice, "Let it go, or I'm going to shoot you."

"No. Please don't shoot her," a bystander says.

Near the end of the video, the officer places her in handcuffs.

McCrary asks repeatedly, "What did I do? What did I do wrong?"

DeKalb County Police Department said in a statement, "The narrative in the officer's report appears to be consistent with the video."

The officer wrote in his incident report that he took McCrary to DeKalb County Jail, "where she was refused and deferred to Grady Memorial Hospital for further evaluation." He noted she had a half-inch cut on her shin and a welt on her forearm. She was later released by the hospital.

McCrary was charged with obstructing or hindering law enforcement officers. She was given a criminal trespass warning at the request of the convenience store manager, police said.

CNN is attempting to reach McCrary or her lawyer.

CNN affiliate WGCL reported McCrary is currently in jail for an unrelated charge. One man who says he knows McCrary told WGCL that she's often seen at the store asking for money and alluded to mental health issues.

[Andrea]

Minneapolis Police Officer Fatally Shoots Australian Woman Who Called 911 for Help

http://fusion.kinja.com/minneapolis-police-officer-fatally-shoots-australian-wo-1796964768?utm_source=fusion_facebook&utm_medium=s ocialflow&utm_campaign=socialflow_fusion_facebook& utm_content=link

A 40–year–old spiritual healer from Australia who was engaged to be married next month was shot and killed Saturday night by a Minneapolis police after calling 911 to report suspicious activity in an alley by her home.

Police have not released many details of the shooting, and family members of the woman’s fiancé, a 50–year–old Minnesota man, say they are frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the police department.

The name of the victim, who lived in the U.S. for about three years, has not been released pending notification of relatives in Australia.

A statement by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released Sunday and reported by the Star Tribune said that two officers responded to the 911 call about a possible assault in an alley off W. 51st Street around 11:30 p.m.

“At one point one officer fired their weapon, fatally striking a woman,” the statement said.

The son of the victim’s fiancé said she would have walked about 100 yards in a well–lit alley to reach the scene of the shooting.

According to the Tribune, the responding officers’ body cameras were turned off during the incident, and patrol car cameras were unable to record what happened.

The shooting occurred just over a year after former police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb during a traffic stop. Castile, whose girlfriend and her 4–year–old daughter were in the car at the time, had complied with the officer’s orders when Yanez inexplicably began firing.

Last month, a mostly white jury found Yanez not guilty of manslaughter charges, sparking nationwide protests including in Minneapolis–St. Paul, where thousands took to the streets in anger after the verdict was announced.

A vigil and rally for the latest victim was planned for Sunday evening in the southern Minneapolis neighborhood where the shooting occurred.