Eyewitness testimony: Death of Portland protester Michael Reinoehl was targeted assassination
11 September 2020
An eyewitness has come forward to contradict official claims that Michael Reinoehl, a left-wing opponent of police violence who was killed in Lacey, Washington on September 3, died in a shootout with police. According to the witness, an ordained minister who lives nearby, police opened fire without warning and Reinoehl did not appear to be armed.
Reinoehl had fled from Portland, Oregon to the suburb of Olympia, Washington, about 120 miles north, after a warrant was issued for his arrest in the fatal shooting of an armed fascist, Aaron Danielson, during a right-wing attack on antipolice violence protesters. Reinoehl had claimed self-defense, saying he was acting as a defense guard for the protests that have taken place in Portland over the past three months.
In interviews with press contacts, Reinoehl said he was fleeing because he feared being murdered by the police because of his political views, a fear that was fully justified as events have since demonstrated. He became the victim of what can only be called a targeted assassination, whose instigator resides in the White House.
The official account is that when police accosted Reinoehl in the parking lot of an apartment building, he pulled a gun and exchanged fire with them. The officers who fired their weapons were from the Pierce County (Tacoma) Sheriff’s Office, the Lakewood, Washington Police Department, and the Washington Department of Corrections (the prison system), operating as part of a federal/state task force.
But eyewitness Nathaniel Dingess, a 39-year-old ordained minister who lives in the apartment complex, said police gave Reinoehl no warning or command before they opened fire and shot him dead. According to a statement issued by Luke Laughlin, his attorney, Dingess saw Reinoehl walk towards his car holding a cell phone in his hand and eating a piece of candy, when two unmarked police cars converged, blocking the exit from the parking lot.
“Officers shot multiple rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl before issuing a brief ‘stop’ command, quickly followed by more rapid-fire shooting by additional officers,” the statement from Dingess reads. The witness said he did not see Reinoehl with a handgun or reaching for one. Police claimed to have recovered a gun in Reinoehl’s possession but have not said if it had been discharged.
This account was first published Wednesday in the local media in Portland, Oregon, but by Thursday it was being prominently reported on the website of the Washington Post, the leading newspaper in the US capital, under the headline, “Police shot Portland slaying suspect without warning or trying to arrest him first, witness says.”
This was accompanied by an extraordinary 18-minute video presentation on the newspaper’s website that profiled the experiences of four protesters arrested in Portland by heavily armed agents dressed in camouflage and unidentified except for the word “police.” The four were held for periods of up to 12 hours and interrogated, then released without charges.
The Post headline—“Swept up in the federal response to Portland protests: ‘I didn’t know if I was going to be seen again’”—captures the terror inflicted on those arrested by federal agents using methods reminiscent of Latin American death squads.
Evelyn Bassi, 30, a lifelong city resident, is a bartender and chef. Mark Pettibone, 30, had recently completed a master’s degree at Reed College in Portland and works at a grocery store. Tawasi, 44, is a Native American who uses only one name, lives in Portland, and works as a delivery driver and video blogger for the protest movement. He is a pacifist. Police accused him of being a Canadian named Ronald Hickey and sought to bring charges against the Native American of illegally entering the country.All four were from the Portland area, not “outside agitators,” and all four were active in the protest movement against police violence but unaffiliated with any left-wing organization, let alone the supposed Antifa, which is more of a label adopted by antifascist protesters than an actual group.
The fourth arrestee who discussed his experience with the Post was John Hacker, a 36-year-old recent graduate of Portland State University who works as a “citizen-journalist” documenting the Portland protests and the repressive measures of all levels of the state: Portland cops, Oregon state police and federal agents.
Bassi and Pettibone were grabbed by armed agents and put into unmarked vans as they walked on downtown streets late at night, while Tawasi and Hacker were likely targeted because they were engaged in documenting the role of the police for left-wing social media outlets.
After the Trump administration largely pulled federal agents out of Portland in August, it mobilized fascistic supporters, who staged several rallies in the Portland suburbs, then organized a series of caravans that drove into the city and carried out violent attacks on those protesting police violence. In some cases, they fired paint balls, pepper spray and other noxious irritants, and displayed firearms.
It was in the course of one such confrontation, on August 29, that Aaron Danielson, who was firing paint balls and pepper spray at protesters and carrying a handgun, was shot and killed.
One aspect of the killing of Michael Reinoehl—that he was carrying his cell phone when shot down—has particular significance from the standpoint of security. OregonLive.com reported that the US Marshals Pacific Northwest Violent Offenders Task Force obtained “pen register” and “trap and trace” warrants from a Portland-area judge.
As the WSWS wrote Thursday, “The court-approved warrants permitted the task force to track the GPS location and cell phone call data from Reinoehl’s cell phone and pinpoint his precise location.” One hour and 14 minutes after the judge approved the warrant, the police apparently followed the cell phone signal to Reinoehl’s location and shot him dead.
The moral author of Reinoehl’s execution-style slaying by police is President Trump. For months he has held up Portland as the prime target for his law-and-order and anticommunist demagogy. He dispatched hundreds of federal agents to the city, including the notorious BORTAC unit of Customs and Border Protection, a SWAT-style unit that has operated all over the world against so-called terrorists.
In the past two weeks, Trump has defended the right-wing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down two unarmed protesters against police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then hailed the killing of Reinoehl, calling it “retribution.” Attorney General William Barr called the killing of Reinoehl “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.”
The Trump administration and the police are seeking to create a political atmosphere that justifies in advance whatever violence is carried out by the fascist right against left-wing protesters and the working class as a whole.
They are assisted in this by their Democratic Party opponents, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who have remained silent on both the execution of Reinoehl by the police and the gunning down of the two protesters in Kenosha by Rittenhouse. The Democrats have sought to present themselves as more competent and serious advocates of “law and order” and police repression than Trump.
Nathaniel Dingess, the eyewitness who has bravely come forward to expose the police lies about the killing of Reinoehl, expressed fear for himself and his family as a consequence of his testimony. His attorney, Luke Laughlin, and other civil liberties lawyers have called for an independent investigation into the shooting of Reinoehl, rather than that conducted by the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, which has jurisdiction because the killing took place in Thurston County, Washington.
In a statement to the press, Laughlin said, “Given the political sentiment of the deceased, and the national climate regarding police shootings, the investigation ought to be handled by an outside organization without ties to law enforcement, if it can really be considered fair and neutral.”
He continued: “At a time when public outcry over police killings is at its peak in this country, it is imperative that the circumstances of Reinoehl’s death not be swept aside.”
The killing of
Elijah McClain and the silent crisis of racism in suburban policing
National Correspondent
,
Yahoo News•September 11, 2020
One officer “choked, slapped, and slammed” a 12-year-old Black
girl, whom he also insulted with an ugly racial slur, according to allegations
contained in a legal filing. After being involved in another, unrelated
incident where he was accused of racism, he lost his job, only to win it back
after an appeal. He remains a member of the police department in Aurora, a
suburb of Denver.
Also on the Aurora police force is the officer who in 2003
killed Jamaal Bonner, an unarmed Black man. And the officers who in 2010
violently confronted Rickey Burrell, a Black man who was having a seizure. The
department eventually settled a lawsuit filed by Burrell, who accused officers
of fracturing his wrist and injuring his back.
The Aurora Police Department has recently been in the news for
what happened on Aug. 24, 2019, when three of its officers tried to arrest
Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was walking home from a grocery
store. The officers choked and then restrained McClain, ignoring his cries of
distress. Emergency responders injected him with ketamine instead of offering
medical help, which McClain desperately needed and would not get in time. He
suffered cardiac arrest and died two days later.
Elijah McClain in a hospital bed. (Change.org)
“Aurora’s persistent racist brutality is so widespread that it
has been very difficult to catalog all of the examples,” says Mari Newman, a
civil rights attorney who is representing the McClain family. Though she has
represented them from the start, only now has the case attracted the kind of
national attention that could lead to justice.
Eight years ago, Aurora was the focus of national sympathy after
a gunman killed 12 people at a midnight film showing. The site of the massacre
was 3 miles due south from the spot where McClain was killed. At that time,
Aurora became the symbol of a culture drenched in gun violence. Now it is a
symbol again, this time of another culture out of control: suburban
policing.
Some progressives have held up suburbs as police-free zones,
wondering why inner cities cannot enjoy similar circumstances. “A lot of people
cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like,” Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently said of the push to defund police departments and redirect
money to social services. “Tell them it looks like a suburb.”
Only it doesn’t. The notion that policing is nonexistent in
suburbs is inaccurate. The vast majority of killings by police occur in
suburbs, not large cities, according to the news outlet FiveThirtyEight. In 2016, a study ranked the
100 biggest American cities on how frequently police officers use force; Aurora
ranked eighth. Close behind were Anaheim, a
suburb of Los Angeles, and Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix. The relentlessly
scrutinized — and criticized — New York Police Department was near the bottom of the list.
“When you look at the numbers, there are about as many people
killed in suburban areas alone as everywhere else combined. This is a huge
issue,” says Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of the Mapping
Police Violence project
and author of the FiveThirtyEight analysis. “Big cities tend to be more
progressive, politically,” Sinyangwe added. “While rates are going down in big
cities, they’re actually going up everywhere else.”
ACLU Colorado
In 2018, the Better Government Association and public radio
affiliate WBEZ examined 113 officer-involved shootings in the Chicago suburbs
over the previous 15 years. They found that officers were not disciplined in any of those instances.
In fact, some of the “suburban officers saw careers flourish after being
involved in a controversial shooting,” the multipart investigation found.
The majority of the 113 people those officers shot were Black.
This is a story that plays out regularly on suburban streets and
in suburban counties across the nation. But because most police stops, even
violent ones, don’t result in killings — let alone killings like McClain’s that
become a national cause taken up by celebrities — the crisis of suburban
policing has gone largely unexamined.
“Nobody reports on its, nobody covers it,” says DeRay Mckesson,
the prominent racial justice activist affiliated with Black Lives Matter.
Mckesson grew up in Catonsville, Md., just over the Baltimore city line. He
watched reporters swoop in for the civil unrest following the 2015 killing of
Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of city police officers. Most
of those reporters moved on, forgetting about Baltimore.
Mckesson wishes they had stayed, in particular to cover the use
of force by the county police department, which has jurisdiction over
Baltimore’s suburbs. Last year the county department was sued by the Trump
administration for racist hiring practices. The move received some coverage, but nothing like the sustained reporting that followed the
murder of Gray.
Trump has used fear of racial justice protesters to make
suburban safety a campaign issue, deploying racialized language and imagery to
suggest that white people living in the suburbs would be unsafe if Joe Biden,
the former vice president, were to win November’s election. He has even said
that Biden wants to “destroy our suburbs,” presumably a reference to
defunding the police (which Biden does not support) and fair housing legislation
(which Biden does).
Aurora is a case study in how the suburbs have changed over the
years while suburban police departments have not. In some ways, those
departments share Trump’s vision of the suburbs more readily than do many
suburban residents themselves.
Suburban police departments tend to take “much more of a
law-and-order kind of approach” relative to their urban counterparts, says
Rebecca Neusteter, a scholar of policing at the University of Chicago. “Arrests
in cities have gone down significantly over time, at least in some categories,
whereas that has not been the case in some suburbs.”
And while suburbs have experienced rapid diversification in
recent years, that change has not been uniformly welcomed. In some places,
aggressive policing is not only tolerated but also actively endorsed, even as
major cities like Minneapolis and Seattle call for radical reimagination of law
enforcement. Neusteter describes a public hearing in a Washington, D.C., suburb
at which a member of the public asked a police chief “why they don’t use force
more.”
The suburbs are a place instantly recognizable but not easily
defined. That makes it difficult to say what makes a suburban police
department, a problem compounded by the fact that some suburbs are policed by
countywide departments that answer to an elected sheriff.
Although no standard definition exists, according to the Federal
Bureau of Investigation there are 7,001 suburban police departments in the
nation, out of a total 13,128 local departments. The FBI defines suburbs as
cities with fewer than 50,000 people, though its calculation also includes
county departments within large metropolitan areas.
Elijah McClain playing violin. (Family handout)
It can take a killing like that of McClain to focus attention on
a department that has deployed overly aggressive policing against people of
color, according to civil libertarians and activists in the Denver area. And
they have done so, those critics maintain, with what amounts to complete
immunity.
The Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed
a legal brief against the department in July — just as Colorado was opening a
new investigation into the McClain killing — alleging on behalf of a different
plaintiff that Aurora “maintained an explicitly unconstitutional biased-based
policing policy that allowed officers to use race as a motivating factor in
policing decisions.”
An analysis of police activity in Aurora by criminologist Lance
Kaufman conducted earlier this year found that African-Americans were 5.5 times
more likely than other people to have Aurora Police Department officers use
force against them. They were 1.4 times more likely to be shot with a Taser,
but were 16 times less likely than other races to injure a police officer
during an arrest.
That last finding, Kaufman wrote in his analysis, was
“statistically significant at an extremely high level,” proving that not only
did Aurora cops use force more frequently against Black people, but that the
use of force appears to be less frequently justified in those cases than in
confrontations with any other group.
In 2015, for example, OyZhana Williams was shoved to the ground and tackled because she’d dropped car
keys to the ground instead of handing them over to police officers, who had
engaged in a tense encounter with her in a hospital parking lot. During a 2017
“welfare check,” Aurora police officers hog-tied Vanessa Peoples, a Black woman
in her 20s, “so tightly that they dislocated her shoulder,” according to
the Colorado ACLU filing.
OyZhana Williams being attacked by police in 2015. (Frank &
Salahuddin LLC)
Those complaints point to concerns long predating the McClain
killing. In 2005, an Aurora officer shot and killed Naeschylus
Carter-Vinzant for allegedly violating the terms of his parole. In 2009, an Aurora officer
kicked Carla Meza in the head, breaking a facial bone. That officer was fired
but managed to win back his job.
The Colorado ACLU says all of these incidents — in which the
victims were all people of color — and the McClain killing constitute a
“disturbing pattern” of the Aurora Police Department “using force against
people of color that would not be used against similarly situated white
arrestees.”
Aurora’s most notorious arrestee is James Holmes, a white man
responsible for the 2012 movie theater shooting. He was apprehended by the
Aurora Police Department without the use of force and is currently in federal
prison.
“The unjustified killing of Elijah McClain by Aurora police is
part of an ugly and long-standing pattern of racially biased policing in that
city. In case after case after case, Aurora police unnecessarily escalate
tension, fear and violence when interacting with people of color,” says Mark
Silverstein, director of the Colorado ACLU.
“The tragic result is that in one of Colorado’s most racially
diverse cities, people of color, especially Black people, feel threatened when
interacting with the city officials whose job is to protect them and ensure
their safety,” Silverstein says.
But whose safety are suburban police supposed to ensure? That
question, of course, brings up another, more fundamental one: Who are the
suburbs for?
Since the 1950s, when they were created to accommodate the
postwar population growth, the suburbs have been “idealized by white
populations,” says Andrea Boyles, a sociologist and author of “Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for
Comfort.” The
continuing arrival in major Northern cities of Black people from the South only
accelerated that shift, known as white flight. Then the civil unrest that shook
many cities in the late 1960s all but completed the suburbanization of white
America.
This is exactly what happened to Denver and Aurora, just as it
did to Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Chicago and Cook County and
many other metropolitan areas where increasingly neglected city centers came to
be surrounded by wealthy, white suburbs with safe neighborhoods, good schools
and plenty of green space. Racist practices sanctioned by federal housing statutes made sure the initial home
buyers were white.
(Though racial covenants are a thing of the past, some of the
racist practices still exist in vestigial form: Westchester, N.Y., has
continued to grapple with allegations of discriminatory real estate practices into
the 21st century.)
African-Americans settled in a part of Denver called Five
Points, a thriving community nicknamed the “Harlem of the West” in the 1920s. Martin Luther
King came to speak in Denver in 1967, a year before he was assassinated. Although the city did not
explode in the kinds of unrest that the nation witnessed in Newark and Detroit,
televised images of burning buildings and federal troops on American streets
hastened the shift of white populations to the suburbs.
The Five Points area of Denver. (John Leyba/The Denver Post via
Getty Images)
No place was better positioned to take advantage of that shift
than Aurora, which annexed land and built housing throughout the 1970s to
welcome families fleeing the big city next door. As across much of the West,
vast tracts of open land practically begged for development. One mall arose in
1971, another four years later. By 1980, Aurora was “recognized as the fastest
growing city in the United States,” according to a city history. Ten years later, the city’s
population was approaching a quarter-million people.
That population was, at the time, overwhelmingly white. But that
started to change in the aughts, as middle-class Black families and young Black
professionals looked to escape cities. “Every time a friend of mine calls to
say they are moving to Denver, I tell them about Aurora,” a Black native of
Denver named Ryan Ross told the Denver Post in 2012. The newspaper noted that
between 2000 and 2010 there were 14,000 new Black residents in Aurora,
representing the largest such increase in the state.
This phenomenon, known as Black flight, accompanied a return of whites to cities their parents or
grandparents had fled. So while Washington, D.C., lost its Black majority in 2011,
the suburbs of adjacent Prince George’s County came to be known as the city’s “Ward 9” (the district has eight wards, with Wards 7 and 8 being home
to the preponderance of Black residents). Latinos also moved to the suburbs
near places like Chicago.
Elijah McClain’s mother, Sheneen, was among those who moved her
family to the suburbs, “out of a hope that it would be safer,” says family
attorney Newman. “She was concerned about gang violence in Denver.”
Sheneen McClain during a rally and march June 27 outside the
Aurora, Colo., police department over the death of her son Elijah. (David
Zalubowski/AP Photo)
Communities that had been white for two or three generations
suddenly saw an influx of people of color. “White comfort seems to be
prevalent,” says Boyles, “when Black folks are situated in the inner
city.”
This was especially true as crime rose in the late 1980s and
early 1990s.
The reasons for that rise were complex, but the media often
explained it as having resulted from the trade in crystallized cocaine, or
crack. The drug’s inner-city purveyors were seen in the popular media as wanting to exploit white
suburbanites for profit. That perception likely increased fears of African-American
families — like the McClains — fleeing those very inner-city neighborhoods for
the suburbs.
A 1994
report from
the Department of Justice described a seemingly dire state of affairs: “Many
urban communities are experiencing serious problems with illegal drugs, gang
violence, murders, muggings, and burglaries. Suburban and rural communities
have not escaped unscathed. They are also noting increases in crime and
disorder.”
By that time, crime was actually declining in most major American
cities, having peaked in either 1990 or 1991 across the nation. But like his
Republican predecessors, President Bill Clinton wanted to project a
tough-on-crime attitude, which he needed to win centrist support for his 1996
reelection bid. That imperative became especially urgent after the Republican
rout during the 1994 midterms.
In the Senate, a comprehensive anti-crime bill was crafted by a
skilled dealmaker who had long made successful overtures to the chamber’s
conservatives: Joe Biden. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act sought to punish both
violent and drug-related offenses more severely. Critics also say that it led
to the mass incarceration of Black men.
Stephen Sposato, center, whose wife was killed when a gunman
invaded the San Francisco law firm where she worked, and Marc Klass, right,
whose daughter was kidnapped and killed, look on after President Bill Clinton
signs the $30 billion crime bill in 1994. (Dennis Cook/AP Photo)
A quarter century later, that vision of policing persists
largely untouched, which is why the last two Democratic nominees for president
have been hounded by the legacy of the 1994 crime bill. Only very recently have
activists, reformers and politicians offered a new vision of criminal justice
that has backing outside the usual precincts of the left. But what reform will actually
look like — defunding the police, abolishing police departments altogether,
devoting more money to community organizations — when it arrives in Washington,
as it inevitably will someday soon, nobody yet knows.
At the very least, both McClain’s killing and Trump’s invectives about criminals coming for housewives have led the nation to
think more deeply than it has for a long while about what cities are, and what
suburbs are, and what it means for someone to truly belong somewhere. McClain
seemed to belong in the suburbs. But on an August night last year, that came to
count for nothing.
Even as Black people entered the suburbs, they did not
necessarily attain the power to dictate decisions on the local level. In
particular, local government remained a “stronghold” for whites, says Rayshawn
Ray, a Brookings Institution fellow. Elected leaders, in turn, usually appoint
fire and police chiefs, as well as other municipal officials. That means that
even as some suburbs became more diverse, those suburbs’ power structures mostly remained white.
That became apparent after teenager Michael Brown was killed by
a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. In Ferguson, like in many other St.
Louis suburbs, growing Black populations did not lead to growing Black
representation in government.
“Longtime white residents have consolidated power, continuing to
dominate the City Councils and school boards despite sweeping demographic
change. They have retained control of patronage jobs and municipal contracts
awarded to allies,” wrote former Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith in the New York Times,
describing what was happening in Ferguson but also, as he noted, in suburbs all
over the country.
This filtered down to interactions between individual Black
residents of Ferguson and members of the police force who were supposed to
protect them. The Ferguson Police Department used traffic stops to essentially turn minor
infractions into a major revenue source. “Ferguson police officers from all
ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police
department, and that the message comes from City leadership,” a 2015 Department
of Justice report on policing practices in Ferguson found, even as it declined to press charges against the officer who
killed Brown.
It wasn’t just traffic stops, either. In her book on the largely Black suburbs to the north and
west of St. Louis,
the sociologist Jodi Rios cataloged infractions for which Black residents of
those suburbs might incur a visit from the police: “the number of people around
their barbecues, the types of music they listen to, the coordination of their
curtains, the way they wear their pants, where they play basketball, how they
paint their backdoors, where their children leave their toys, who spends the
night at their houses, who parks a car in their driveways, and how they use
their front porches.”
Rios goes on to argue that “cumulatively, this has led to what
many residents express as a lifetime of indebtedness and fear, and a feeling of
being trapped in a place they do not have the means to leave.” The promise of
suburban living, in other words, was never extended fully to many Black
families who had been captivated by that very promise.
Aurora, Colo., police in riot gear during a June 27 protest over
the death of Elijah McClain. (Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
What was true in St. Louis was true elsewhere in America, and
even if the specific practices were different, a pattern was plainly at work in
the suburbs, one that was made worse by the gap between the demographics of
police forces and the populations being policed. Mckesson, the Black Lives
Matter activist, says an unhelpful “public narrative” cast the suburbs as
havens of safety that only someone from elsewhere could disturb.
“The only danger is coming from outside,” Mckesson says of that
narrative. Police officers, in this Trumpian version of events, are working
only to keep malevolent influences at bay. “The public narrative is that they
are not the issue,” says Mckesson. The killing of McClain has challenged that
belief, calling into question whether police departments as white as Aurora’s
are effective in working with populations that are no longer uniformly white.
A 2016 analysis by Brookings scholars Alan Berube and
Natalie Holmes looked at the racial composition of 122 suburban communities around
the country. “Most secondary city and suburban police departments, it turns
out, exhibit even larger diversity gaps than their nearby big cities,” Berube
and Holmes found.
That lack of diversity has real-world effects. In Prince
George’s County, Md., Black police officers alleged in a 2018 lawsuit that the
county department “had a persistent problem of officers who engage in racist
conduct (including abusive police practices), both towards Officers and
Civilians of Color.”
That same year, the sheriff of Bergen County, which encompasses
the wealthy suburbs of New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from
Manhattan, resigned after he was found to have made racist statements.
“Police can easily come to a point where they have very little
self-awareness,” says Brandon del Pozo, who was a precinct commander in New
York and later served as the police chief in Burlington, Vt., and has written frequently on police reform. “They’re really insulated from
a lot of accountability.”
He cites the lack of media attention as a problem. “Everyone’s
hounding the NYPD for its data,” he says, but few journalists show a similar
interest in numbers for suburban police departments. “Who is watching what they
are doing?”
Elijah McClain could have been forgotten — but wasn’t. His
plight resurfaced on the internet during the protests that followed the killing
of George Floyd in late May. More than 5 million people have signed a petition calling for justice. That
call has also been taken up online, as well as by politicians.
In an essay published after his death, civil rights icon and
longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis called McClain a “gifted violinist.” At
the U.S. Open earlier this week, tennis phenom Naomi Osaka wore a face
mask emblazoned with McClain’s name.
Police in Aurora have responded to recent protests over the
McClain killing by violently disrupting a peaceful demonstration at which
several people played the violin. Three officers have been fired
from the force in connection with mocking photographs taken at the site where
McClain died. One of those officers, Jason Rosenblatt, had been involved in the
attempt to apprehend McClain. The infraction that caused him to lose his job was responding to the
offensive photograph over email with a “ha ha.”
Aurora, Colo., police officers clash with demonstrators during a
protest over the death of Elijah McClain, June 27. (Andy Cross/The Denver Post
via Getty Images)
Interim Police Chief Vanessa Wilson apologized for the photo,
calling it a “crime against humanity.” Several weeks later, her officers
stopped a car with five Black women. Guns drawn, the officers handcuffed them
and ordered them onto the pavement. The officers believed the car was stolen.
It had not been. Wilson promised an investigation. Her office did not respond to a request
for comment for this article. Neither did that of the city’s mayor, Mike
Coffman.
There are now five federal and state investigations into
McClain’s killing and the Aurora Police Department. Late last month, McClain’s
family sued 13 officers involved in the arrest, as well as a paramedic, a
doctor and the city of Aurora itself. The suit charges that McClain was
“terrorized” by a policing department that “permits and encourages a culture of
racial violence.”
“This is a department that needs to be rebuilt from the ground
up,” says Newman, the McClain family attorney. “The culture is rotten to the
core.”
The text of the lawsuit she has filed against the Aurora Police
Department opens with McClain’s final words, which were captured on the
responding officers’ body cameras: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, please. I
can’t. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, please stop."
Cover thumbnail photo: Rich Fury/Getty Images
_____
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