Tuesday, June 23, 2020

AMERICAN POLICE - A CONDONED, ABETTED AND ENABLED CRIMINAL CLASS - HERE'S HOW THEY WORK IT FOR THE MURDERERS


My Family Saw a Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween. Then I Learned How NYPD Impunity Works.

ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky’s family saw an unmarked NYPD cruiser hit a Black teenager. He tried to find out how it happened, and instead found all of the ways the NYPD is shielded from accountability.
by Eric Umansky

 June 23, 5 a.m. EDT

Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica

Last Halloween, my wife and then-6-year-old daughter were making their way home after trick-or-treating in Brooklyn. Suddenly, an unmarked NYPD car with sirens wailing began speeding against traffic up a one-way street, our neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. The officer seemed to be going after a few teenage boys.
Then, in an instant, the car hit one of the kids.
It was the first of many jarring things my family saw the NYPD do that night. Afterward, I tried to find out more about what exactly had happened and whether officers would be disciplined. There was footage and plenty of witnesses, and I happen to be an investigative journalist. I thought there was at least a chance I could get answers. Instead, the episode crystallized all of the ways in which the NYPD is shielded from accountability.
This happened in my neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, which is overwhelmingly white. Residents named it that in the 1960s to distinguish it from nearby Red Hook, where the population was largely Black. The area has changed enormously over the decades. But even now, it’s segregated almost block by block.
Halloween is the one day that it can seem like an integrated neighborhood. With lots of stoops and storefronts, there’s always plenty of candy to be had. Kids from the whole area come for the haul.
The police said a group of teenage boys that night had punched and kicked another teenager at a nearby playground and stolen his cellphone. The teen flagged down an officer and was driven around the neighborhood looking for the boys. He pointed out a group, and police descended from different directions. One car sped against traffic until it hit a kid; the boy slid over the hood, hit the ground, and then popped up and ran away along with the others.
My wife took a photo of the car right after:
The NYPD car that went against traffic and hit a teenage boy. (Courtesy of Sara Pekow)
The police then turned their attention to a different group of boys. My wife and others said they were younger and didn’t seem to have any connection to the ones who had been running. Except that in both groups, the boys were Black.
The police lined five of the younger boys against the wall of our neighborhood movie theater and questioned them, shining bright lights that made them wince and turn their heads. The smallest of the boys was crying, saying, “I didn’t do anything.”
My daughter took in the scene. “What did the boys do wrong?” she asked. The family members of a couple of the boys were there. They had all been trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.
The police eventually let the two boys with relatives go and arrested the three others: a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old.
My wife came home with my daughter and urged me to go back. I arrived about half an hour after everything started, a bit after 9 p.m., just as the handcuffed boys were put into a police car.
I watched the mom of one of the freed boys try to tell the ones being arrested to shout out their parents’ numbers, so somebody could tell them what was happening. An officer stood in front of the car window to block the boys from sharing their numbers. Another officer walked up close to the mom and started yelling at her to shut up. A senior officer backed him away.
I also watched another little girl take it all in. She was about the same age as my daughter. Except my daughter is white, as am I. The little girl is Black, and she had just watched her brother be put against the wall and her own mother being yelled at by a cop.
The boys were driven to our local precinct, the 76th. I eventually made my way there, too. The families of all the boys were there. The police are required to notify families when a minor is arrested. But the families told me that hadn’t happened. They’d learned about the boys’ arrests from friends. (The police later said the families showed up so quickly they didn’t have time to make notifications.)
The parents stood outside the precinct for the next four hours, waiting to be allowed to see their kids. One of the fathers, silent most of the time, said he was worried about how late the kids were being held because they still had school in the morning. A mother had to leave her 2-year-old with a neighbor. She paced around outside the station. “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.”
The police didn’t allow the parents into the station or let them see their kids. At one point, an officer came out, apologized and explained that the station was simply waiting for paperwork to go through. The boys were finally let out around 12:45 a.m.
They weren’t given any paperwork or records about what had happened or told the arresting officers’ names.
The next day, our daughter and her 8-year-old brother were full of questions: “Why did they arrest the boys if they didn’t do anything wrong?” “Is the boy that got hit OK?” I had questions, too. So I called the NYPD. What was the department’s understanding of what happened, I asked, and was it going to investigate any of the cops’ actions?
I felt a sense of kinship with the NYPD’s spokesman, Al Baker. He’s a former journalist. We followed each other on Twitter. Surely, he’d tell me the real deal.
Baker soon called me back. He had looked into it. The boys were being charged with something called “obstructing government administration,” which basically amounts to resisting arrest.
The police hadn’t done anything wrong, Baker said. I don’t know what your wife saw, he explained, but a police car did not hit a kid.
So I went back to my wife and asked her, “Are you sure?” She was sure. It happened right in front of her. Still, memories are fallible. So I went into nearby storefronts and asked if anyone had seen anything the night of Halloween.
“Yeah, I saw a cop car hit a kid,” a waiter told me. He said he had a clear view of it: A handful of kids were running. One of them jumped out into the street and got hit by the police car, “probably going faster than he should have been.” He saw the boy roll over the hood and fall to the ground: “It sounded like when people hit concrete. It made a horrible sound.”
I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.
As his statement put it: “One unknown male fled the scene and ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”
 Transcribed statement from New York Police Department spokesman Al Baker.
The NYPD has units devoted to investigating its own cops. The city’s district attorneys can also charge officers, of course. But there is supposed to be another check on abuse by police.
New York City has an agency dedicated to investigating civilians’ allegations against the police, the straightforwardly named Civilian Complaint Review Board. After reporters covered what happened on Halloween, the CCRB responded to a Twitter thread I had written, saying it was investigating. Once again, I assumed we’d get answers.
But the NYPD has long fought against truly independent civilian oversight. Seventy years ago, community groups banded together and pushed the city to address “police misconduct in their relations with Puerto Ricans and Negros.” The NYPD responded by creating the CCRB. But it didn’t have any actual civilians on it. The board originally consisted of three deputy police commissioners.
The first outsiders were appointed more than a decade later, by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration. The police unions fought it. “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting,” said the head of one.
Things have changed a lot over the years. The civilian board now has about 200 staffers, and its investigators dig deep into cases. My wife said a CCRB investigator who called her was incredibly thorough.
They have lots to do. In 2018, the latest year for which there’s complete data, the board logged 2,919 complaints against NYPD officers for punching, shoving, kicking or pushing people. Each complaint can contain multiple allegations and involve multiple officers. About 9% of the members of the force have had six or more complaints of some type made against them.
The names of all of those officers have long been kept secret, which is finally set to change after New York repealed the notorious “50-a” law that had barred disclosure of police discipline records.
 Source: Civilian Complaint Review Board 2018 Annual Report
A recent CCRB report focused on police abuse against Black and Latino boys: “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
In one case, a few boys were walking home and throwing sticks when police swarmed them, drew guns and ordered the boys up against a wall. The kids were “compliant and cooperative,” the report says, but the commanding officer at the scene decided to arrest two of the boys, ages 8 and 14, for disorderly conduct for throwing the sticks. The report notes: “The children were transported to the stationhouse, handcuffed and in tears.”
The report flagged a few other troubling patterns. One was the NYPD not notifying parents of arrests. Another was children being held for running from plainclothes officers.
I asked the NYPD about the report and everything else in this story. They didn’t respond.
The CCRB assiduously logs all complaints it gets against the police, about 7,000 per year. But actually investigating them, let alone meting out discipline, is a different matter. The NYPD still has control of nearly every step of the process.
Take body cams, which are now standard equipment for NYPD officers. There’s almost certainly footage of exactly what happened on Halloween. But civilian investigators don’t have direct access to the footage. They email requests to the NYPD, which decides which footage is relevant. The department takes its time.
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The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them.
Wendi C. Thomas is a black journalist who has covered police in Memphis. One officer admitted to spying on her. She’s on a long list of prominent black journalists and activists who have been subjected to police surveillance over decades.
The CCRB’s monthly report shows investigators have made nearly 1,000 requests for body cam footage that the NYPD hasn’t yet fulfilled. More than 40% of the requests have been pending for at least three months.
The CCRB and NYPD recently hashed out an agreement to marginally improve the process: CCRB investigators can now go to a room and watch footage. The agreement stipulates that CCRB staff can only take notes. They cannot record anything or use footage they see of abuse that happens to be different from the specific incident they’re investigating. They must sign a nondisclosure agreement. The deal runs nine pages.
It’s different elsewhere. Civilian oversight investigators in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and New Orleans all have direct access to the body cam footage. Unlike New York, police there can’t redact footage. “That type of behavior should have gone out about 50 years ago,” the head of Washington’s civilian oversight board told WNYC.
Here’s another glimpse into the leverage NYPD officers have: Since the pandemic started, officers haven’t allowed CCRB to interview them remotely, meaning investigations have effectively stalled. The police unions had objected to doing it over video.
“We won’t do Zoom,” one union spokesman told The City. The CCRB is re-starting in-person interviews soon. It noted 1,109 investigations are awaiting police officer interviews.
Most CCRB investigations aren’t completed, and not just because of police intransigence. The roughly 100 investigators can only handle so many cases at once. Each one is its own challenge; witnesses often don’t respond or are hesitant to say what they saw.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has increased the office’s budget in recent years to hire more investigators. But after the pandemic hit, de Blasio laid out a 6% cut for next year. (Asked for comment, the mayor’s office said the cuts are only for one year.) A city report recently noted that the CCRB’s staffing is already below the level mandated by a referendum passed last year to expand the agency.
If a complaint does end up being investigated, the police still get to decide what happens. The police commissioner can take the case back from the CCRB at any point. If the commissioner doesn’t interfere, and if the board — which still has some members chosen by the commissioner — finds that abuse occurred, then the CCRB can recommend discipline.
The CCRB has been able to get to that point and confirm plenty of cases. In 2018, again the most recent year for which there’s full data, the board calculated that the NYPD had 753 active officers who’ve had two or more substantiated complaints against them.
But even if the CCRB substantiates a case, the commissioner still has complete authority over what to do next. He can decide to simply ignore the recommended punishment. The commissioner can also let the case go before an internal NYPD judge (whose boss is the commissioner). If the judge decides punishment is merited, the commissioner can overturn or downgrade that, too.
The NYPD has rejected the CCRB’s proposed punishment on the most serious cases about two-thirds of the time.
So that’s how the system works. And this is what comes out of it: In 2018, the CCRB looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days, according to CCRB records.(An additional five officers got a lower level of discipline left to the discretion of their commanding officer.) The most an officer lost was 30 vacation days, for a prohibited chokehold. Another officer wrongly pepper-sprayed someone. He lost one vacation day.
Last winter, I sat down with one of the boys my family saw arrested, Devrin. We were with his mom and the founder of the celebrated charter school he attends in Red Hook called Summit Academy.
Ellen DeGeneres gave college scholarships to the senior class a few years ago after the school founder, Natasha Campbell, wrote to her about the kids’ accomplishments. The vast majority of the students are Black or Latino.
Campbell told me her guess is that at least 40% have been stopped by police at some point. Students are stopped so often that the backs of their student IDs have instructions about what to do when that happens.
 Instructions on what to do when stopped by the police are on the back of student IDs at Summit Academy in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (Eric Umansky/ProPublica)
Devrin, who was in ninth grade and turned 14 the day before Halloween, sat with me and his mom in Campbell’s office. He’s about 5 feet tall and sat slightly hunched over. It was clear that sitting with a stranger and being asked questions about that night wasn’t his first choice. But his mom and Campbell had encouraged him to, so there he was.
Devrin answered a few questions I asked to try to break the ice. He loves basketball, is on the JV team and had practice in about an hour. Campbell pointed out that he’s never been suspended or disciplined at school.
“I don’t even get in trouble at home,” Devrin chimed in. And then he talked about his experience on Halloween.
Devrin said he was finishing up trick-or-treating when “I just saw a bunch of cops jumping out of their cars.” It was a confusing scene, particularly so because some of the police were in plainclothes, including one who started to go after Devrin. Devrin said he didn’t know the man was an officer.
“I was taught when I see danger to run,” Devrin said. He was starting to run home when he heard the plainclothes officer say he was following a suspect with a Tom & Jerry shirt. That’s what Devrin was wearing. “I turned,” Devrin recalled, “and he pointed a gun at me. He said, ‘Stop before I shoot.’ He was like this with both his hands” — Devrin mimicked holding a gun — “like he was about to pull the trigger.”
I spoke to another witness from that night who recalled the same scene but said the officer was pointing a Taser. Devrin and the witness, a law student named Zoe Bernstein, agreed on what happened next: The officer pushed Devrin to the ground and handcuffed him. “They tackled him,” Bernstein told me. “He just looked so young.”
Devrin was lined up against the wall. He’s the one who was crying, saying, “I didn’t do anything.”
After he was taken to the station, Devrin was handcuffed to a table along with the other boys, asked a few questions and mostly left alone. Then, they said, “You can leave now.”
“I didn’t really sleep that night,” Devrin told me.
He said he just wants to forget about what happened. His mother, Deveeka, wants to let him do that, “but I can’t sit in this thing and let it go. I want answers.” (I’m using only their first names at her request.) She was the mother at the station that night upset with herself that she had let him go.
She said she makes Devrin call her whenever he goes out, even to the corner store. “I’ll ask, ‘Dev, you OK?’ And he’ll say, ‘Yeah, you OK?’” She would seem to have a particular advantage in getting answers. At the end of our interview, she mentioned her job: She’s a school safety officer for a public school in Brooklyn. She works for the NYPD.
Deveeka said she was considering suing but said she’d had a hard time finding a lawyer because the police, her own agency, said they have no records to give her. And despite the NYPD announcing the boys had been charged with obstruction, they didn’t actually follow through with it. “All I have is a story,” she said.
Last week, facing enormous pressure after protests, de Blasio announced reforms. The city is going to post NYPD discipline records online, and police have to move quickly to investigate and release camera footage when there’s alleged abuse involving serious injuries or death. The police commissioner also said he’s disbanding a plainclothes unit that’s been involved in many shootings.
None of the changes limit the commissioner’s absolute discretion over discipline.
The CCRB said this month that it has received more than 750 complaints about NYPD abuse in less than two weeks involving the recent protests. There were 129 separate incidents reported. And the mayor’s office recently said there’s likely little bodycam footage of the incidents since the NYPD adheres carefully to an old civil rights agreement limiting the filming of protests.
I recently called the CCRB to ask the status of its investigation into the Halloween case.
It said the investigation is still open, along with 2,848 others.

The Police Are Still Rioting

By 


Police in riot gear.
Police in riot gear. Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
The wave of protests that started with the May 25 police killing of George Floyd continued apace over the weekend, nearly a month after footage of his death went public. The furor that prompted some dissidents to riot during the early days of unrest has mostly settled. The rioting of police officers inflamed by ongoing challenges to their authority has not.
The latest examples are law-enforcement agencies in Compton, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Richmond, Virginia. A march on Sunday responding to the killing of Andres Guardado — an 18-year-old who was shot several times on Thursday while fleeing Los Angeles County sheriff deputies — saw dozens of protesters trek nearly four miles from Gardena, where Guardado died, to a sheriff’s station in Compton; they were ordered to disperse, and as they did, officers unleashed tear gas and fired rubber bullets into the retreating crowd. “They just wouldn’t stop shooting,” one protester told CNN. In Columbus, a group of protesters blocked a downtown intersection on Sunday; police deployed pepper spray and swung their bicycles at dissidents, ramming people toward the sidewalks in an effort to clear the road. And on Sunday night, police in Richmond broke up an effort to pull down a statue of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart; officers declared an unlawful assembly shortly after 9 p.m. and sprayed the crowd with chemical irritants, a culmination of weeks of crackdowns in which local police have used tear gas and rubber bullets overwhelmingly to punish peaceful dissent.
The recent conduct of American law enforcement when dealing with protests has been characterized by a broad refusal to distinguish between nonviolent dissidents — who comprise the vast majority of people taking to the streets — and the scattered rioters against whom officers claim to be protecting themselves and others. They’ve undermined their own rationale by beating, clubbing, and using chemical agents, rubber bullets, and sometimes police vehicles to target not just peaceful demonstrators, but those actively trying to heed dispersal orders; in cities from Atlanta to New York, police have made a habit of creating chaos where orderly dissent existed before, hemming in crowds from all directions so people couldn’t escape and using the resulting crush as a pretense to assault and arrest them. Video footage of police shoving elderly people to the ground, beating unarmed demonstrators with nightsticks, and smashing car windows to use Tasers against random college students has lost much of its shock value. Brutal arrests, justified by citing their targets’ alleged violations of curfew orders, seem to correlate only sporadically with whether curfew orders are actually being violated. In many cases, police unions and their rank and file have responded to criticism by doubling down in support of offending behavior; suspensions, firings, arrests, and criminal charges filed against officers have been met with solidarity walkouts by entire policing shifts and supportive applause for comrades under fire.
As my colleague Ed Kilgore recently noted, the term “police riot” gained popular purchase after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when a commission formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the event’s unrest used it to describe how police dealt with protesters. “Wild club swinging,” “cries of hatred,” “gratuitous beating” that far exceeded the “requisite force for crowd dispersal and arrest” — all pointed, in the view of report author Daniel Walker, to a pattern of unchecked misrule, a “riot” in its own right. Jamelle Bouie, in the New York Times opinion section, applied the term to how police across the country have responded to the latest protests, citing officers’ widespread use of “indiscriminate violence.” This behavior has not abated, even as its geographic concentration shifts. Overall, where public backlash might reasonably be expected to encourage introspection among law-enforcement officials, it has frequently provoked violence and indignant revanchism instead.
The persistence of this behavior dovetails neatly with recent analyses that undermine two key claims made by police and their defenders. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that since late May, 20 individuals, aged 16 to 59, have sustained eye damage or been blinded by rubber bullets or other police projectiles not intended to kill. This adds an important caveat to such weapons being characterized as “less than lethal”; that they’re not designed expressly to kill anyone is, surely, not very consoling for the journalist who can’t see anymore because Minneapolis police shot her in the face with foam bullets. A recent University of Chicago study, meanwhile, has found American police to be in violation of basic international human rights’ standards, despite routine insistence among officials that their current severity is needed. The 193 member states of the United Nations, including the U.S., have agreed to a range of principles governing when lethal force is justified, aimed at fulfilling four criteria: “legality, necessity, proportionality, and accountability.” Not a single U.S. state complies, according to the report, further delegitimizing conceptions of the police as guardians of safety.
These findings are all the more stark for emerging at a time when the excesses of American law enforcement are on abundant display — and as policing institutions, by and large, continue to insist that nothing is wrong with them, but rather that the problem is the people they’re tasked with protecting, who can only be kept “safe” by using wanton brutality and murder with impunity. Violence over the past weekend in Compton, Columbus, and Richmond, attests to the durability of this outlook. The defining features of the police response to protests asking them to do their jobs differently have been an imperviousness to criticism and insistence that their officers are under siege by an ungrateful public. The result has been — and will likely continue to be — repetition of the same methods for at least as long as protesters are in the streets. And the police will keep providing reasons to protest; Andres Guardado and Rayshard Brooks were both killed while demonstrators were still mourning George Floyd. But the enduring lesson from earlier civilian riots is that no one actually has to riot for the police to respond in kind. When you’re tasked with public safety but rarely asked to prove that you’re preserving it, there are few limits to what you can get away with in its name.

Nationwide protests against police violence continue as LA County sheriffs kill two more


22 June 2020
For the third week in row, multiracial protests against police violence have continued across the United States in large cities as well as rural communities. Initially triggered by the release of a cellphone video depicting the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25, demonstrations against police violence have taken on an international character, with thousands continuing to march in London and Paris over the weekend.
On Sunday hundreds of protesters in Washington, D.C. briefly shut down a highway that led to the US capital. In Columbus, Ohio, at the behest of Democratic party Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus police were given the green light Sunday afternoon to assault and teargas peaceful protesters.
In a video posted by NBC journalist Eric Halperin, Columbus police are shown ramming protesters with their bicycles and pepper spraying them. Ginther justified the brutality on Twitter writing that in order to “keep the streets open” and “protect residents from lawlessness ... increased enforcement today has been necessary.”
In New York City over 10,000 cyclists took over Manhattan streets Saturday afternoon, riding a 20-mile loop from Times Square to Harlem and down a car-free West Side Highway to Battery Park, chanting the names of George Floyd and 26 year-old Louisville EMT Breonna Taylor, murdered in her sleep by police during an early morning no-knock raid on March 13, 2020.
Meanwhile, at a half-full arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Saturday night, President Donald Trump briefly railed against the protesters outside the venue branding them “very bad people” and “thugs.” In response to Trump’s characterization of the protesters Tulsa police were forced to admit that while there were “thousands” of people protesting outside the arena, “Overwhelmingly these encounters have been peaceful with everyone attempting to share their views.”
Over the weekend, two shootings, one in Minneapolis, the other in Seattle, have been hyped by the bourgeois press to paint the movement against police violence as more dangerous and violent than the police themselves.
In Minneapolis, one person is dead and eleven more were injured following an early Sunday morning shooting on the 2900 block of Hennepin Avenue South. Police have yet to release a description of the alleged shooters and no one has been arrested at this time.
Fred Hwang, a manager at Hoban Korean BBQ, who was working the front door when he heard the shots ring out at roughly 12:25 a.m., saw two groups of people firing at each other. Hwang helped usher people into the restaurant to avoid the gunfire as they waited for over 30 minutes for police to arrive.
In Seattle a 19-year-old man is dead and another critically injured after an argument escalated Saturday morning shooting in the area of downtown known as CHAZ for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.” Police have stated that they were unable to assist after being, “met by a violent crowd that prevented officers safe access to the victims.” Video evidence filmed by protesters shows that police were allowed to enter the zone after the shooting and state investigators were in the zone gathering shell casings Saturday morning.
Featured articles on the police murder of George Floyd
In Los Angeles, a rally for the recently murdered Andres Guardado exceeded expectations with thousands participating Sunday afternoon. The march began at 1 p.m. with roughly 100 people, but by the time the march reached the front of the Los Angeles County Compton Sheriff's (LASD) office, which was surrounded by riot police, the crowd had swelled into the thousands.
It has been over 72 hours since police gunned down the 18-year-old Guardado, who was working as a security guard at the Freeway auto body shop located on the 400 block of Redondo Beach Blvd. According to Captain Kent Wegener of the LASD, deputies were “observing Guardado,” who allegedly spotted the deputies looking at him. Upon seeing the police, Guardado supposedly “produced a gun” before running away from the police. Wegener stated that after a short foot-pursuit an as-yet unnamed deputy “fired six shots” into Guardado, killing him. No deputies were injured.
Police have stated they recovered a gun at the scene that had an illegal large capacity magazine and was devoid of any serial numbers of identifying marks. No video footage or pictures have been produced to corroborate the police allegations. The police have yet to state why they were “observing” Guardado to begin with, as there had been no calls placed for police assistance at that address.
Andrew Henney, the owner of the body shop, described Guardado as “a good friend” and disputed the police retelling of events. In a video interview with Memo Torres of LA Taco, Henney states that Guardado, “was standing near the curb ... talking to two girls and then the police approached him and right away drew their guns, pointing them at him, and he got scared and he ran.”
Gesturing down the alley, Henney states he saw Guardado, “on his knees with his hands behind his head, that’s when the cops shot him.” In a separate interview with CBS KCAL Henney noted that Guardado had “a clean background and everything. There’s no reason."
Henney also questioned police reports that Guardado was armed, “I don’t think so, I never knew him to be armed, he wasn’t a gang member, he had never been so much as arrested, he was the coolest kid.”
Notably, which has gone unreported in mainstream versions of the events, Henney states that investigators Thursday night locked down his store and proceeded to break and confiscate several security cameras Henney had installed at the shop. Police also took his DVR, all before obtaining a warrant, which Henney noted police produced several hours later.
Guardado’s cousin, Celina Avarca, in an interview with CBS, also disputed police accounts of Guardado being armed:“I’d never heard or seen him have any kind of weapons,” Avarca said. “He never talked about them.” Avarca also said her cousin was working two jobs and was in the process of applying to school to become a nurse
Jennifer Guardado, the slain man’s older sister, also speaking to CBS, noted the bright future the family saw for Andres, “He was gonna make it in life. He was gonna make it and become a good, professional man in life, but they took that away from my family and me.
“My parents are completely destroyed. We’re all dead already inside.”
“I lost a part of me, it’s empty, and I’m never gonna have him back,” his sister added. “I’m never gonna see him, he’s never gonna talk to me, I’m just, I can’t, I just can’t believe this happened to my brother. It really hurts me.”
In an interview with author Julissa Natzely Arce Raya, Guardado’s father, Cristobal, who works in the restaurant industry, noted that his son recently started the job to help his father pay for the bills: “He told me he wanted to help me. But this didn’t help me. He just came to meet his death.”
“He had just graduated high school. He didn’t deserve this. El era un buen hijo.” (He was a good son.)
Guardado was the second man shot to death by LA County sheriffs in a 48-hour period. Terron Jammal Boone, half-brother to Robert Fuller, who was found dead hanging from a tree last week in Southern California, was shot multiple times by deputies after an alleged traffic stop turned violent last Wednesday.
As was the case with Guardado, none of the detectives, deputies, or police cruisers were equipped with cameras.


Millions across the US 

 mark twenty-fifth day of 

 mass demonstrations 

 against police violence

20 June 2020
Millions of people protested across the US on Friday, the twenty-fifth day in a row, against police violence and for equality in demonstrations, marches and rallies that also celebrated Juneteenth, the date in 1865 that the last slaves in the Confederacy were freed, nearly two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect.
With hundreds more events scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, this weekend could see the largest demonstrations held yet in the more than three weeks of protests that erupted in cities and towns in the US following the murder of 46-year-old African American man George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day.
Protesters march over the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan following a Juneteenth rally in Cadman Plaza Park, June 19, 2020, in New York [Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo]
The corporate media, the Democratic Party and organizations within the periphery of the Democrats are continuing to inject racial identity politics into the mass movement that has erupted in the US and around the world, insisting that the cause of police violence is anti-black racism within the majority white American population.
However, within the racially and ethnically integrated protests—many of which are made up of a majority of white people in small towns and rural areas in every corner of the country—the demand for universal equality continues to predominate.
Thousands of people marched and rallied in eighteen scheduled events in all five boroughs of New York City on Friday, beginning with a rally at Washington Square Park in Manhattan at 10:00 AM. According to the New York Times, “Other throngs, unswayed by the steamy summertime weather, stopped and gathered near City Hall, in Harlem and at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn Heights.”
The gathering at Cadman Plaza was a convergence point for multiple crowds of thousands of people in Brooklyn, who then marched as one mass across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, shutting down one of the roadways on the bridge.
The protesters converged in the evening in Central Park for a mass rally, the first time that all of the different protest groups have come together in New York City. The Times also reported, “In the early afternoon, a motorcade made up of dozens of vehicles, some scrawled with slogans like ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Happy Juneteenth,’ made its way from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn across the East River to Manhattan.
“When the caravan reached City Hall, drivers of all races raised their fists and honked their horns at a crowd holding signs reading ‘Stop Police Crimes’ and listening to Nina Simone’s voice over a loudspeaker.”
In an effort to adapt themselves to the mass movement, Democratic Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order making Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees and Democratic Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio announced that June 19 will become an official holiday in the city.
The Juneteenth celebrations originated from the arrival of Union troops into the city of Galveston, Texas—near the Gulf Coast border with Louisiana—and the announcement on June 19, 1865 by General Gordon Granger of federal orders proclaiming that all slaves were free.
Although Lincoln had issued his presidential proclamation freeing slaves in the rebellious states on September 22, 1862, and it went into effect on January 1, 1863, Texas was the most remote of the Confederacy and it took Union troops two months after the end of the Civil War to arrive their and enforce the executive order.
In Washington, DC, numerous rallies and marches took place on Friday within the capital and in the surrounding communities to the northeast in Maryland and southwest in Virginia. With thousands of people converging on the capital, DC police have for the third weekend in a row shut down streets and announced restrictions on specific locations in the downtown area.

The Washington Post reported, “Police said intermittent closures are possible Friday, Saturday and Sunday as needed, although day-long closures weren’t expected. In the downtown area, street closures are possible south of L Street NW, roughly between 18th and 12th streets NW. South of E Street on and near the Mall, the closures roughly extend to Independence Avenue SW between 17th and Third streets.”
Despite storm clouds and rain, the protests went ahead with hundreds marching down 14th Street NW and protesters assembling at the Lincoln Memorial to mark “Freedom Day”, another popular name for Juneteenth. Hundreds also gathered at Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcom X Park, and marched down 15th Street NW and then turned onto U Street and went to the office of Democratic DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Early in the morning, a longstanding monument to the segregationist and founding owner of the Washington Redskins NFL football team, George Preston Marshall, was dismantled and removed from the grounds of RFK Stadium. The Post reported, “The action followed years of lobbying by local residents who objected to memorializing an owner who opposed desegregation. It was taken down by Events DC, the city’s convention and sports authority that manages and is currently redeveloping the 190-acre RFK campus that served as the Redskins’ game-day home from 1961 to 1996.”
On the west coast, thousands of protesters marched and were joined by longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area, shutting down the Port of Oakland, as part of the closure of 29 West Coast ports.
An indication of the concern within the official American political establishment about the racially integrated, spontaneous protests made up largely of young people, the Port of Oakland rally was addressed by the former Communist Party USA leader Angela Davis with the support of union bureaucrats. The “stop work meeting” by the longshoremen had been carried out with the support of the corporate Pacific Maritime Association and was included in the ILWU-PMA contract.
As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, “Addressing a crowd of a few thousand from her dark grey Mini Cooper, activist, college professor and philosopher Angela Davis praised the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for their port work stoppage. She spoke from her car wearing a mask to maintain social distance, and union leaders monitored the crowd to make sure participants kept on their masks. ‘We are still on the long road to freedom,’ she said. ‘Whenever the ILWU takes a stand, the world feels the reverberations.’”
Many other protests took place in the Bay Area, including a youth rally outside the Santa Clara County building against the incarceration of young people, a march by a crowd of protesters down Broadway to city hall in Oakland and a rally in front of city hall in San Jose.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Democratic Mayor Greg Fischer was eager to participate in a virtual panel discussion on Friday morning with activists to mark Juneteenth, given the growing anger of residents and protesters nationally over the brutal murder of Breonna Taylor more than three months ago by three police officers.
By noon Mayor Fischer had announced that one of the three Louisville Metropolitan Police Department officers, Brett Hankison, was being fired. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported, “Hankison is accused by the department's interim chief, Robert Schroeder, of ‘blindly’ firing 10 rounds into Taylor's apartment, creating a substantial danger of death and serious injury.”
The other two LMPD officers—Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Officer Myles Cosgrove—also fired their weapons into Taylor’s apartment, but remain on administrative reassignment.
Sam Aguiar, attorney for the family of Taylor, told the Courier Journal, “It’s about damn time,” that Hankison was fired and that the characterization of the officer “blindly” firing into her apartment is accurate. “In fact, the ten rounds you fired were into a patio door and window which were covered with material that completely prevented you from verifying any person as an immediate threat or more importantly any innocent persons present,” Aguiar said.
Taylor, who was 26 years old and a front line emergency medical tech worker when she was killed on March 13, was shot eight times and died on the floor of her apartment after the three officers serving a “no-knock” warrant broke down her door and started shooting.
Multiple protests also took place on Friday in Dallas, Texas to mark Juneteenth and protest police violence. A group of protesters demanding equality rallied outside of City Hall while carrying 239 yellow umbrellas, each one with the name of an individual killed by police violence. The marchers were met on the city hall plaza by over 400 bikers from dozens of North Texas motorcycle clubs.
The Dallas Morning News also reported, “Soon after, about 350 protesters representing nine Greek Life organizations commenced a 2 1/2-mile march from Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. to City Hall, collecting additional marchers joining along the way despite 90-degree temps.”
Marches, rallies, sit-ins and a “virtual gamer gathering” were organized in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday with thousands taking to the streets in the metropolitan area. Protesters gathered at Centennial Olympic Park and at the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by an Atlanta police officer last Friday.
The officer who shot Brooks, Garrett David Rolfe, was fired and then charged with felony murder and other charges on Thursday. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that Rolfe, who faces charges which could bring the death penalty or life in prison, will have a bond hearing on Tuesday.
A CNN report said that a majority of Atlanta police officers scheduled to work in two of the city’s six police zones, did not report to work on Friday to protest the charges against Rolfe. CNN reported, “The Atlanta Police Department denied officers weren’t showing up for their shifts, but a police union director backed the accounts by CNN sources. In some instances, officers were refusing to leave their precincts unless a fellow officer required backup.”
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