Sunday, September 13, 2020

BLACK LIVES MURDER - THE REALITY OF BLACK VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

 

'We Hope They Die!'

Black Lives Matter mob blocks emergency room for L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies gunned down Saturday night.

  

On Saturday night, two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies stationed their patrol car near the Willowbrook Metro station in Compton. At approximately 7 p.m., a masked gunman appeared to walk past the vehicle then turned and fired multiple shots, hitting both deputies.

Fox News Los Angeles reporter Bill Melugin obtain video of the shooting and confirmed a “100 percent ambush. A man slowly creeps up to the vehicle like he’s stalking it, fires shots through the window.” The Sheriff’s department posted the video and Sheriff Alex Villanueva held a press conference wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The ambushed deputies were a 24-year-old male and a mother of 31, both recent additions to the department.  “I want everyone to have a prayer for them for their recovery at this time,” the sheriff told reporters. “This was a cowardly act,” Villanueva said, and “words have consequences,” a reference to anti-police rhetoric now raging in Los Angeles and across the country.

As Villanueva wrapped up, a mob confronted sheriff's deputies, with one member shouting “It’s a celebration! It’s a celebration!” Others taunted deputies and took videos with their phones. As this played out, the ambush victims encountered other conflict at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood.

Black Lives Matter mob assembled outside the hospital chanting “Death to police!” The mob blocked entrance to the hospital emergency room, where family members of the wounded officers were present. “I hope they fucking die,” one man yelled, with another adding “Y’all gonna die one by one. This ain’t gonna stop.”

As police struggled to disperse the mob, a woman ignored commands to stay back and interfered with an arrest. Unidentified in some reports, she turned out to be Jodie Huang a reporter for KPCC radio. Huang attended the sheriff’s press conference and did not identify herself as a reporter on arriving at the hospital.

KPCC is part of Southern California Public Radio, which proclaims, “as an organization we condemn systemic racism — and racism of any kind — and remain committed to reflecting the diverse communities we serve. With that in mind, we say the statement “Black Lives Matter” reinforces our commitment.”

In July, Huang tweeted, “Black Lives Matter is a spiritual movement,” and authored a report on a BLM action at the Federal Building in Los Angeles, in solidarity with rioters in Portland.

“Longtime activist Akili had this message for federal authorities,” Huang wrote, “Do not come to L.A.!” Black Lives Matter also used the event, “to remind protesters what they were fighting for in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a police officer in Minneapolis, and to urge unity against President Trump, as well as fascism and capitalism.” Black Lives Matter activist Janaya Future Khan told followers, “See yourselves as the movement, not adjacent to it. You are the revolution.”

President Trump, in Nevada for a campaign event Saturday, retweeted the video of the ambush, adding that those who perpetrate such attacks are “Animals that must be hit hard!” California assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat and African American, told  reporters, “this was an unprovoked, cowardly act. This individual will be caught.” Nick Hanna, U.S. Attorney for the California’s Central District, called the ambush “a cowardly and despicable act.”

Murdering police officers is standard practice for black radicals such as Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army. Now a fugitive in Cuba, Chesimard is known as Assata Shakur. As Black Lives Matter of Los Angeles proclaimed last year, “Assata’s words and living example serve as an inspiration to Black Lives Matter and ground us in our collective purpose, to fight for freedom and win.”

The shooting of the two deputies maintained the targeting of police, but the attempt to block the emergency room could mark an escalation to terrorist practices.  In December 2015, for example, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino and rigged bombs to take out the first responders.  In similar style, blocking wounded victims from an emergency room strengthens the case that Black Lives Matter, like Antifa, is a domestic terrorist group.

The shooting of the deputies, followed by mobs at the press conference and hospital, suggests a coordinated action. Jody Huang, arrested in the BLM action at the hospital, also writes for LAist, which is part of KPCC and Southern California Public Radio. A publicly funded entity thus engages in open promotion of Black Lives Matter.

On Sunday, President Trump tweeted that if the deputies die, “fast trial death penalty for the killer. Only way to stop this!” Joe Biden tweeted “This cold-blooded shooting is unconscionable and the perpetrator must be brought to justice.” Kamala Harris, formerly attorney general of California, told reporters “the perpetrator must be brought to justice.”

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti wrote, “we strongly condemn this cowardly ambush & stand prepared to offer aid.” Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday denounced the “cowardly, horrific act” and called for the perpetrator to be “quickly brought to justice.”

At 7 a.m. Sunday, NBC News reported, both deputies were still alive and out of surgery. The Sheriff’s department announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter, described as a 28- to 30-year-old black man wearing dark clothing.


‘F**cking Die’: BLM Activists Lay Siege to LA Hospital Treating Officers Hit in ‘Ambush’ Shooting

screengrab shooting
Screengrab
2:31

Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters allegedly blocked the entrance to an emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital early Sunday morning where two police officers were being treated for gunshot wounds after an “ambush”, the sheriff’s office has claimed.

The two deputies suffered multiple gunshot wounds in what appears to have been an unprovoked, close-range attack through the passenger window of their patrol car in Compton on Saturday night, as Breitbart News reported.

The 31-year-old female deputy and 24-year-old male deputy both underwent surgery Saturday evening, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said in a late-night news conference. Both graduated from the academy 14 months ago, he said.

President Donald Trump condemned the shooting, as have local leaders.

Trump retweeted the video early on Sunday and wrote, “Animals that must be hit hard!”

Later, referring to the deputies, Trump tweeted, “If they die, fast trial death penalty for the killer. Only way to stop this!”

Others offered their support for the downed officers.

Protesters later gathered outside St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood where the deputies were being treated, according to social media video and the sheriff’s department.

Footage released to Twitter captured the scene.

Police were quick to respond.

“To the protesters blocking the entrance & exit of the HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM yelling “We hope they die” referring to 2 LA Sheriff’s ambushed today in #Compton: DO NOT BLOCK EMERGENCY ENTRIES & EXITS TO THE HOSPITAL,” the department wrote on Twitter around midnight local time.

A radio reporter who was near the protest scene was taken into custody, KABC-TV reported. The sheriff’s department later tweeted the reporter interfered with the arrest of a male protester.

“The female adult, who was later identified as a member of the press, did not identify herself as press and later admitted she did not have proper press credentials on her person,” the department stated.

Capt. Kent Wegener said officers were blanketing the area in search of the suspect seen on the video opening fire with a pistol.

“We have a very, very generic description,” he said.

AP contributed to this report

Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com

One LASD Deputy Shot in the Face; Other Shot in the Head

LASD (Jason Lawrence / Flickr / CC)
Jason Lawrence / Flickr / CC
3:10

One of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) deputies attacked Saturday evening was shot in the head and the other was shot in the face, the Los Angeles Times has confirmed.

As Breitbart News reported, two deputies were shot as they sat in their patrol car in Compton “without warning or provocation” in an attack captured on video:

LASD deputies have been targeted by Black Lives Matter protests, as well as self-described anarchists and Antifa supporters, since the shooting death of a black man, Dijon Kizzee, earlier this month.

Kizzee allegedly fought with police who tried to pull him over for a bicycle infraction. He allegedly had a gun at the time of the confrontation.

Nightly protests, many of them violent, have taken place outside the LASD facility in South Los Angeles.

Officials said that the two officers were conducting a routine patrol outside an L.A. Metro train station when they were attacked. One of the two victims was able to tell fellow officers that the shooter was a “dark-skinned male.”

LASD Sherrif Alex Villanueva said that the two officers graduated police training together and were sworn in 14 months ago.

He said they were both suffering from “multiple gunshot wounds” and were out of surgery.

The Times confirmed: “Law enforcement sources told The Times at least one of the deputies was shot in the face and the other in the head.”

President Donald Trump condemned the shooting, as have local leaders. Former Vice President Joe Biden later added his own condemnation.

LASD Captain Kent Wegener has said that anyone with information should call the LASD at 323-890-5500.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Photo: file

LOS ANGELES - COP MURDER CAPITAL OF AMERICA - TWO DEPUTIES IN AMBUSH SHOOTING FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES

 

2 L.A. Deputies Fighting For Their Lives After Ambush Shooting As They Sat In Their Car

Mary Papenfuss

Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were “fighting for their lives” Saturday after a lone gunman walked up to their parked patrol car and fired on them through an open window, officials said.

The female and male partners were hit multiple times in the car outside a metro station in the city of Compton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said at a press conference Saturday night.

Surveillance footage of the scene released by authorities shows a man walking up to the car on the passenger side and firing several times “without warning or provocation,” said an earlier statement from the LASD. The suspect immediately fled on foot.

The shooter hadn’t been apprehended as of late Saturday.

“These are real people doing a tough job,” Villanueva told reporters. “It just shows the dangers of the job in the blink of any eye.”

He called the shooting a “cowardly act. The two deputies were doing their job watching out for the safety of the people on the train,” adding, “Seeing somebody just walk up and start shooting on them — it pisses me off. It dismays me.”

The deputies were not identified, but Villanueva said one is the 31-year-old  mother of a 6-year-old boy. The male deputy is 24. Both of them joined the force just over a year ago, said Villanueva, who swore them into office.

The two were both out of surgery by late Saturday. “We’re going to keep them in our thoughts and prayers,” said Villanueva.

The Sheriff’s Department posted a clip of the surveillance footage on Twitter. It’s shown below. Be warned: It’s disturbing.

Officials asked for anyone who had witnessed the shooting or knew anything about it to contact the LASD.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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COP REIGN OF TERROR IN AMERICA - VIDEO - THREE THUG COPS BEAT UP ON BLACK TEEN - NOW WATCH A CORRUPT LAWYER-JUDGE LET THEM OFF

 

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.

Police walk past evidence markers at a scene Thursday, Sept. 3, in Lacey, Wash., where Michael Reinoehl, 48, was killed by a federal task force. (AP Photo/Ted Warren)

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.”

 

 

https://news.yahoo.com/the-killing-of-elijah-mc-clain-and-the-silent-crisis-of-racism-in-suburban-policing-154201039.html

 

The killing of Elijah McClain and the silent crisis of racism in suburban policing

Alexander Nazaryan

National Correspondent

,

Yahoo NewsSeptember 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.

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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Rough arrest of Black teen in southern Louisiana prompts internal police probe


David K. Li and Ali Gostanian and Caitlin Fichtel and Caroline Radnofsky and The Associated Press
NBC News
 
 
 
WATCH: Video appears to show Louisiana police officer punching Black teen during arrest
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Police in southern Louisiana put one officer on leave, removed two more from regular duty and launched an internal probe of their confrontation with two Black teens, officials said Thursday.

Bystander video appeared to show at least one officer throwing punches as Lafayette police handcuffed a young Black male Saturday night at the Acadian Lanes Bowling Alley. It wasn't immediately clear what happened before the videos showed punches being thrown.

Officers initially came to the scene answering calls that a person was in the parking lot with a gun, but they left after finding no one matching the description, Lafayette Police Sgt. Wayne Griffin told local media outlets.

When officers returned to the same parking lot 30 minutes later for an unrelated traffic stop, that's when they said they spotted that possible gun suspect, Griffin said.

Police did not identify the young men involved, but attorney Ronald S. Haley Jr. said in a statement that his two clients, 16-year-old twins, Gerard and Jabari Celestine, were the ones confronted by officers.

The responding officers handcuffed Jabari as he and his brother were waiting outside to enter the bowling alley and observing COVID-19 safety measures, according to their attorney.

"When officers arrived, they immediately handcuffed Jabari and read him his rights," Haley said in the statement.

"At that time, Gerard inquired with the police as to why his brother was being arrested. In response, officers pushed Gerard to the ground and began brutally beating him, as evidenced by the videos of the encounter."

Gerard was charged with interfering with a police investigation, resisting arrest, and battery of a police officer, while his brother Jabari was released without charges, Haley said.

The twins were not armed, according to Haley.

Lafayette police said the first teen they encountered was cooperative as officers patted him down for a weapon. But then a second teen “may have approached” the officers and “got into their personal space," according to Griffin.

“Then it turned physical,” Griffin said. “I’m not going to go into details of who swung first or anything like that.”

Local police know the twins from previous encounters, Haley said.

"At this time we are vigorously pursuing justice for our clients, who we strongly contend are victims of racial profiling and systemic racism at the hands of Lafayette police," Haley said. "To start, we want the police department to release all information and body cam footage pertinent to the events of last Saturday evening."

In a statement to NBC News on Thursday, the police department confirmed that Saturday's incident is under internal investigation and that one officer has been placed on administrative leave and the other two officers have been temporarily pulled from their regular duties.

Representatives for the local police union could not be immediately reached, via email or phone, on Friday for comment on behalf of the officers involved.

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