Idaho police shot nonverbal, autistic, intellectually disabled juvenile with cerebral palsy nine-times resulting in leg amputation

Dozens of protestors gathered outside the Pocatello Police Department following an officer-involved shooting, according to EastIdahoNews.com.

Their signs read “Bloody Hands, Dirty Cowards,” “Do Better PPD,” “Hold PPD accountable” and “What are Tasers for?”

The protest comes after a teen identified as 17-year-old Victor Perez was repeatedly shot by multiple police officers April 5, 2025 near the 700 block of North Harrison Avenue. Video of the shooting was widely circulated on social media.

The family tells EastIdahoNews.com that Perez has cerebral palsy.

Idaho police officers opened fire from behind a chain-link fence just seconds after exiting their patrol cars and critically wounded a teenage boy — described by his family as nonverbal, autistic and intellectually disabled — as he stepped toward them with a knife, video from a witness shows.

Seventeen-year-old Perez, remained hospitalized in critical condition after having nine bullets removed from his body and having his leg amputated, Ana Vazquez, his aunt, told The Associated Press. Doctors were planning tests on his brain activity.

The video, sent to EastIdahoNews.com by multiple people, shows Perez lying on the ground outside of a home in the front yard. He appears to be holding a knife or some other object and is arguing with a woman, who attempts to get the item from the Perez’s hands.

A neighbor filming the incident is on the phone with a police dispatcher and says Perez, who was on the ground, was hit in the head by a log. Police arrived at the scene at 5:25 p.m., according to a police news release, and four officers get out of their vehicles with guns drawn.

Video shows them yelling at Perez and telling him to drop his weapon. The officers were in front of a chainlink fence and not in the yard. Perez appears to stand up and move toward the officers, who then fire multiple shots.

“Immediate life-saving measures” were performed before Perez was taken to Portneuf Medical Center, according to the news release.

It’s unclear what led to the situation in the front yard, but many say police were too aggressive in their response to the situation.

The Pocatello Police Department remained quiet Sunday and did not release any updates about the shooting. EastIdahoNews.com requested additional information from the department and the city’s public information officer, but our messages were not returned.

The shooting is under investigation by the East Idaho Critical Incident Task Force. Police have asked for public’s patience as the investigation unfolds.

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North Carolina spent $200 million on death penalty since last execution in 2006

North Carolina has not carried out an execution since 2006. In 6 of the last 10 years, North Carolina has not sentenced a single defendant to death. Despite the reluctance of jurors to impose death sentences and the hesitation of prosecutors and politicians to conduct executions, the death penalty has been a significant expense for state taxpayers, according to The Charlotte Observer.

According to a study conducted by Duke University researchers, death penalty prosecutions cost the state roughly $11 million per year. This means North Carolina has likely spent about $200 million on death penalty cases since its last execution in 2006. The additional costs of the death penalty begin at the defendant’s initial trial. Supreme Court precedent demands two separate trials for capital defendants. One to determine the defendant’s guilt, much like a traditional trial. The second trial is a resource-intensive presentation of the defendant’s life and the circumstances of the offense. For these sentencing trials, capital defendants are entitled to services from a wide range of mental health experts who extensively research the defendant’s life to find reasons why they may not deserve a death sentence.

After a defendant is sentenced to death, they go through decades of appeals to ensure that they had a fair trial. At each of the nine stages of appeals, the defendant is entitled to an attorney, and courts typically hire additional experts. If any of these appeals are successful, then the defendant will be entitled to a new, two-stage trial. If the defendant is sentenced to death again, they restart the lengthy appellate process from the beginning.

Although increased litigation costs are the largest reasons for the expense of the death penalty, they are not alone. North Carolina currently houses 136 defendants on death row in Raleigh, which costs roughly $85,000 per year to maintain.

Additionally, if North Carolina were to continue executions, the state would have to spend significant time and money to acquire pentobarbital, a drug legally required for executions in North Carolina. Pentobarbital is no longer sold by American pharmaceutical companies for the purposes of execution.

In 2020, Arizona recently spent $1.5 million to acquire pentobarbital from an undisclosed source. In the time since then, the drug has only become rarer and more expensive. Each of these expenses, from two-stage trials, to paying out countless experts, litigating a seemingly endless set of appeals and procuring expensive drugs, could be avoided by instead sentencing all capital defendants in North Carolina to life in prison and eliminating the death penalty.

While some death penalty proponents may argue for cutting corners to save money in our death penalty system, this is not a feasible option. North Carolina is bound by well-established Supreme Court precedent that grants capital defendants many expensive rights and processes. Further, the appeals system and experts involved in the death penalty serve an important purpose. Without these safeguards, it would be significantly more likely for an innocent defendant to be sentenced to death.

North Carolina has no reason to invest so much time and money into killing, when the state could instead work to protect citizens’ lives today. Our state would be a safer, more compassionate place if we reinvest the millions of dollars we spend on our death penalty system each year into victim’s funds, police training and resources, and mental health services.

The time to abolish the death penalty is now.

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South Carolina resumes executions after 13 year pause

 The 14th Execution of 2024

South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death as the state restarted executions after an unintended 13-year pause because prison officials couldn’t get the drugs needed for lethal injections, reported The Associated Press.

Owens was convicted of the 1997 killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk during a robbery. While on trial, Owens killed a person incarcerated at a county jail. His confession to that attack was read to two different juries and a judge who all sentenced him to death.

Owens, 46, made no final statement. His last meal was two cheeseburgers, french fries, well-done ribeye steak, six chicken wings, two strawberry sodas and a slice of apple pie.

When the curtain to the death chamber opened, Owens was strapped to a gurney, his arms stretched to his sides. After the drug was administered, he said “bye” to his lawyer and she said “bye” to him.

He smiled slightly and his facial expression did not change much before he appeared to lose consciousness after about a minute. Then his eyes closed and he took several deep breaths. His breathing got shallower and his face twitched for another four or five minutes before the movements stopped.

A doctor came in and declared him dead a little over 10 minutes later at 6:55 p.m.

Owens’ last-ditch appeals were repeatedly denied, including by a federal court Friday morning. Owens also petitioned for a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court. South Carolina’s governor and corrections director swiftly filed a reply, stating the high court should reject Owens’ petition. The filing said nothing is exceptional about his case.

The high court denied the request shortly after the scheduled start time of the execution.

His last chance to avoid death was for Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison. McMaster denied Owens’ request as well, stating that he had “carefully reviewed and thoughtfully considered” Owens’ application for clemency.

First execution in 13 years

Owens may be the first of several people to die in the state’s death chamber at Broad River Correctional Institution. Five other people are out of appeals, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has cleared the way to hold an execution every five weeks.

South Carolina first tried to add the firing squad to restart executions after its supply of lethal injection drugs expired and no company was willing to publicly sell them more. But the state had to pass a shield law keeping the drug supplier and much of the protocol for executions secret to be able to reopen the death chamber.

To carry out executions, the state switched from a three-drug method to a new protocol of using just the sedative pentobarbital. The new process is similar to how the federal government kills people on death row, state prison officials said.

South Carolina law allows condemned people to choose lethal injection, the new firing squad or the electric chair built in 1912. Owens allowed his lawyer to choose how he died, saying he felt if he made the choice he would be a party to his own death, and his religious beliefs denounce suicide.

Owens changed his name to Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah while in prison, but court and prison records continue to refer to him as Owens.

The crimes

Owens was convicted of killing Irene Graves in 1999. Prosecutors said he fired a shot into the head of the single mother of three who worked three jobs when she said she couldn’t open the store’s safe.

Hanging over his case was another killing: After his conviction, but before he was sentenced in Graves’ killing, Owens fatally attacked Christopher Lee, whom he was incarcerated with at a county jail.

Owens gave a detailed confession about how he stabbed Lee, burned his eyes, choked and stomped him, ending by saying he did it “because I was wrongly convicted of murder,” according to an investigator’s written account.

The confession was read to each jury and judge who went on to sentence Owens to death. Owens had two different death sentences overturned on appeal only to end up back on death row.

Owens was charged with murder in Lee’s death but was never tried. Prosecutors dropped the charges with the right to restore them in 2019 around the time Owens ran out of regular appeals.

Final appeals

In his final appeal, Owens’ lawyers said prosecutors never presented scientific evidence that Owens pulled the trigger when Graves was killed and the chief evidence against him was a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and testified that Owens was the killer.

Owens’ attorneys provided a sworn statement two days before the execution from Steven Golden saying Owens was not in the store, contradicting his trial testimony. Prosecutors said other friends of Owens and his former girlfriend testified that he bragged about killing the clerk.

Owens’ lawyers also said he was just 19 when the killing happened and that he had brain damage from physical and sexual violence while in a juvenile prison.

“Mr. Owens’s childhood was marked by suffering on a scale that is hard to comprehend. He spent his adulthood in prison for a crime that he did not commit,” attorney Gerald “Bo” King said in a statement following Owens’ execution. “The legal errors, hidden deals, and false evidence that made tonight possible should shame us all.”

South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held a vigil outside the prison about 90 minutes before Owens was scheduled to die.

South Carolina restarts the death penalty

South Carolina’s last execution was in May 2011. It took a decade of wrangling in the Legislature — first adding the firing squad as a method and later passing a shield law — to get capital punishment restarted.

South Carolina has put 43 people to death since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. In the early 2000s, it was carrying out an average of three executions a year. Only nine states have put more people to death.

Since the unintentional execution pause, South Carolina’s death row population has dwindled. The state had 63 condemned people in early 2011. It now has 31 after Owens’ death Friday. About 20 people have been taken off death row and received different prison sentences after successful appeals. Others have died of natural causes.

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Alabama executes man for the brutal murder of an elderly couple

The 6th Execution of 2024

Alabama Death Row inmate Jamie Ray Mills was executed by lethal injection on May 30, 2024 for the brutal slayings of an elderly couple with a machete, ball-peen hammer, and a tire iron two decades ago.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, in announcing the execution had been carried out, stated that “Almost 20 years ago, the grandchildren of Floyd and Vera Hill, worried for their grandparents, filed a missing-person report only for police to discover the couple had been brutally and horrendously beaten to death. The Hills’ lives were taken at the hands of Jamie Mills. The evidence in this case is overwhelming, and Mr. Mills is undoubtedly guilty.”

“Tonight, two decades after he committed these murders, Jamie Mills has paid the price for his heinous crimes. I pray for the victims and their loved ones as they continue to grieve.”

Mills had maintained his innocence, and didn’t mention the crime in his final words.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall also issued a statement Thursday night, saying Mills’ “actions were cold and calculated, and his assigned punishment has never been more deserved.”

Mills was convicted and sentenced to die for the June 24, 2004 beating deaths of Floyd and Vera Hill. The elderly couple were beaten at their Marion County home before, prosecutors said, Mills and his former wife stole cash and prescription medication.

The execution

The execution was carried out at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore using the state’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail instead of nitrogen gas, which was used for the first time in the nation in Alabama in January’s execution of Kenneth Smith. Mills did not elect to change his execution method to nitrogen when inmates were given the opportunity to do so in June 2018.

The curtain to the execution chamber opened at 6:07 p.m., while several of Mills’ five witnesses cried softly in the witness room. One of his witnesses whispered, “Oh my God” as the curtain opened.

During the execution, his family continued to cry softly. One woman whispered, “Oh god” at one point.

After the curtain opened, Mills gave a thumbs up motion towards the witness room where his attorney and family watched, along with members of the media. He was softly trembling as the death warrant was read.

His last words were: “I love my family. I love my brother and sister. I couldn’t ask for more. Charlotte, you fought hard for me. I love ya’ll, carry on.”

He was referring to Charlotte Morrison, his attorney from the Equal Justice Initiative. She was in the witness room.

Mills continuously gave a thumbs up to his family. At 6:12 p.m., his spiritual advisor approached him and prayed over him. Mills mouthed “I love you” to his family. About a minute after that, Mills appeared to slip into unconsciousness.

At 6:14 p.m., a prison guard in the execution chamber performed the standard consciousness check by flicking Mills’ eyelid, yelling his name, and pinching his arm. Mills did not respond to any of those actions.

Curtains to the execution room closed at 6:19 p.m. and his official time of death was 6:26 p.m.

The execution started about an hour and a half after the United States Supreme Court issued orders rejecting Mills’ two appeals and a request to stay the execution.

Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the team who starts intravenous lines for the lethal injection didn’t have any issues finding a vein. Similar issues plagued several executions over the past years, with multiple being called off after IV lines couldn’t be started in time.

He said that Mills had “two sticks” and that each of the two IV lines were started on the first try.

The members of the execution team who start IVs were replaced following the governor’s three-month halt to executions at the end of 2022 and into 2023. Hamm credited that personnel change to the quick turn-around of Mills’ execution.

Members of the Hill family witnessed the execution, but requested their names not be shared.

The family of the Hills released a statement for Commissioner John Hamm to read following Mills’ death. It said, “In the past 20 years, our family has been seeking justice, and today justice has been served. However, it took 20 years to do so. Our family believes in the judicial system, no matter how long it takes.”

“Our family now can have some closure to this heinous crime that he committed and our loving grandparents can rest in peace. Let this be a lesson for those that believe justice will not find you. Hopefully this will prevent others from committing future crimes. God help us all.”

Mills’ last hours

Before the execution, Alabama prison spokesperson Kelly Betts provided a recollection of Mills’ last 24 hours, including his last meals.

On Wednesday, he was visited by his brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, spiritual advisor and a friend. He ate breakfast and lunch, along with snacks throughout the day. He refused his dinner. He also had phone calls with family members and his attorney.

On Thursday, Mills was visited by his brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, spiritual advisor, and attorney. He didn’t make any phone calls.

His breakfast on Thursday was made up of eggs, gravy, prunes, oatmeal, and biscuits. He had snacks including potato chips, a candy bar, and a Sunkist and cola drink. His last meal consisted of a seafood platter with three large shrimp, two catfish filets, three oysters, three onion rings, and one stuffed crab.

Mills, 50, had fought his execution in two separate federal lawsuits: One challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol and another claiming his former wife lied when testifying against him.

Wednesday afternoon, Mills’ lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after having had the appeal rejected by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday.

EJI, which represented Mills for many years released a statement after the execution: “By failing to honestly disclose the conversations and arrangements with the state’s main witness against Jamie Mills at trial, state prosecutors have lied, deceived and misrepresented the reliability of the evidence against Jamie Mills for 17 years. They weren’t honest with Jamie Mills, with the jury, the judge, state and federal appeal courts or the public. New evidence documenting this deceit has been dismissed as ‘too late,’ making finality more important than fairness. This is not justice.”

The group added, “Jamie Mills becomes another person needlessly killed by state officials who comfortably tolerate state deception, violation of the law and breach of fundamental, constitutional rights to carry out a death sentence they claim upholds the rule of law.”

The crime

Floyd Hill and Vera Hill had been married 55 years and lived in Guin, a small town in Marion County. According to an inscription on his gravestone, Floyd Hill was an Army veteran of World War II.

Vera Hill, 72, was in poor health. Though 15 years older, Floyd Hill acted as her caretaker.

Court documents laid out the events surrounding the couple’s brutal deaths on June 24, 2004.

Jamie Mills and his then-wife, JoAnn Mills, went to the Hills’ house on County Road 54. According to JoAnn Mills’ testimony at Jamie Mills’ trial, the Hills let the couple inside for Jamie Mills to use their phone. After he made several phone calls, Vera Hill wanted to show JoAnn Mills some of the items in their shed that she was planning to sell at a yard sale.

Floyd Hill unlocked the shed and everyone looked at the items for sale, according to JoAnn Mills’ testimony. After that, Jamie Mills and Floyd Hill continued to talk inside the shed while the women stepped outside.

JoAnn Mills said that she heard a loud noise and saw her husband swinging something. She followed Vera Hill back inside the shed, when she saw Floyd Hill lying on the ground. Then, she said, Jamie Mills hit Vera Hill in the head with a hammer.

Jamie Mills continued to beat the couple, JoAnn Mills said. At some point, the Mills left the shed and went into the Hill home and stole various items, including Floyd Hills’ wallet, Vera Hills’ purse, a phone, and a tacklebox containing prescription medication.

Guin police stopped the couple the next day when they were leaving their house with the murder weapons and bloody clothes.

The Hills were found after one of their adult grandchildren stopped by to check on them the night of the murders and couldn’t find them. When police arrived and found the elderly couple in their shed, Floyd Hill was pronounced dead at the scene.

Vera Hill was taken to a nearby hospital with serious injuries, and later transferred to UAB Hospital in Birmingham. She died September 12, 2004. Court records show her cause of death was “complications of blunt head trauma.”

JoAnn Mills initially told police a local drug dealer had committed the murders.

But the murder weapons, along with Jamie Mills’ bloody clothes, were found in the Mills car trunk. Jamie Mills has argued that the car trunk didn’t lock, and the drug dealer had access to the couple’s car on the day of the crime.

Mills maintained his innocence.

To read more CLICK HERE

Eleven people shot by Indianapolis police in 2023, all but one black

The Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis said they lost faith in Police Chief Randal Taylor after a Black motorist stopped for a traffic violation was fatally shot running away from an officer August 3, reported the Indianapolis Sar.

Six more people were shot by city police in the eight weeks that followed — and a total of 11 in the first nine months of the year. All but one of them are Black.

The repeated use of deadly force has invoked apathy for some people, who accept it as unavoidable in this era of increased gun ownership and strained relations between residents and the people sworn to protect them.

Members of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, who have been shot twice this year on city streets, say they also have had enough.

“We are fed up with it. The community should be fed up with it,” Assistant Chief Chris Bailey said after the April shooting.

What’s driving the rash of police shootings this year isn’t clear. Police, politicians and community advocates have differing opinions. Experts say a reason can’t be known without scrutinizing each case.

“You would have to analyze the data to see what, if any, patterns emerge from these shootings,” said Jon Shane, professor of police policy and practice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

While debate continues about what may be driving the uptick, the fact remains Indianapolis police officers have killed people this year at a level not seen since 2016.

Chief Taylor told IndyStar in an interview he cannot recall a time in his 36-year career in law enforcement that so many police shootings have happened in such a short period.

"It's definitely concerning," he said.

Fewer police shootings in other cities

Of the 11 people Indianapolis police have shot in the first nine months of the year, six have died. In 2022, police shot four people, one fatally. Officers in six additional incidents fired their guns but did not strike anyone.

“It's a very rare occurrence," Stephanie Whitehead, a criminal justice professor at Indiana University East, said about the frequency of shootings since August.

Not included in the total are three people who were shot by state troopers in the city. Within a week in May, Indiana State Police troopers shot two people in separate incidents. In February, a state trooper shot a man being tracked in a gun and drug investigation.

More people have been shot by Indianapolis police this year than by other agencies in cities with roughly similar population sizes.

San Francisco police, for example, have shot six people since 2022.

Indianapolis surpassed Columbus, Ohio, a slightly larger city, where police have shot 10 people so far this year. Six were shot last year, according to the police department.

Indianapolis also stands out compared to several smaller Midwestern cities.

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Protests in France after fatal police shooting during traffic stop

President Emmanuel Macron of France urgently appealed to parents as the country braced for another night of unrest over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old, with French officials saying that the protests were driven mostly by angry young people and coordinated on social media, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Macron’s government is struggling to contain the rage unleashed by the killing, in which a police officer fatally shot a teenage driver during a traffic stop in Nanterre, west of Paris, on Tuesday. Anger over the shooting tapped into decades-long complaints about police violence and persistent feelings of neglect and racial discrimination in France’s poorer urban suburbs.

Speaking at the end of a crisis cabinet meeting in Paris — the second this week — Mr. Macron called the violence “unjustifiable” and said it had “no legitimacy whatsoever.”

“There is an unacceptable manipulation of a teenager’s death,” said Mr. Macron, who had taken the rare step of leaving early from a European Union summit in Brussels to attend the crisis meeting.

A third of those arrested overnight were “young, sometimes very young,” Mr. Macron said. “It is the parents’ responsibility to keep them at home.”

Over 800 people were arrested over Thursday night after protesters burned 2,000 cars, damaged nearly 500 buildings, looted stores and clashed with riot police officers in Nanterre and dozens of cities around France, according to the Interior Ministry. In Marseille, two plainclothes police officers were badly beaten, according to Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister.

Several cities, like Strasbourg, experienced sporadic daytime vandalism and looting of stores in their city centers on Friday afternoon and evening — a departure from previous days, when the protests were almost exclusively in suburbs. Some protests in Marseille turned particularly violent on Friday evening, as rioters overturned and burned cars.

Now, the country is bracing for a potential fourth night of chaotic protests.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

San Antonio police officers arrested for killing woman having mental health crisis

Three San Antonio police officers have been charged with murder in the fatal shooting of a woman who was experiencing what the city’s police chief said was a “mental health crisis,” reported The Associated Press.

Sgt. Alfred Flores and Officers Eleazar Alejandro and Nathaniel Villalobos were suspended without pay and later arrested on murder warrants in the shooting death of Melissa Perez, 46, when she refused police orders to come out of her apartment, Police Chief William McManus said Friday.

“The officers’ actions were not consistent with SAPD’s policy and training,” McManus said during a Friday night news conference.

“They placed themselves in a situation where they used deadly force which was not reasonable given all the circumstances as we now understand them,” McManus said.

One of the three charged officers opened fire, McManus said, after Perez first threw a glass candlestick at the officers then swung a hammer at them. All three officers then fired when Perez approached them again with the hammer, hitting her at least twice, according to McManus.

Court records do not list attorneys who could speak on behalf of the three officers.

Perez was suspected of cutting the wires to a fire alarm, a felony, at the apartment complex and was talking to fire officials about 12:30 a.m. Friday when an officer approached and tried to get her to walk toward a patrol car, McManus said.

Perez was speaking to a fire department official outside the complex when an unidentified officer arrived and is heard on body camera video calling “hey lady, get over here,” with Perez refusing and walking away.

“It appeared that Miss Perez was having a mental health crisis,” McManus said without offering further explanation, and she then ran into her apartment.

The video then shows an officer on the patio of Perez’s apartment removing a window screen as Perez shouts “stop it” and “you ain’t got no warrant.”

An unidentified officer shouts “you’re going to get shot,” to which Perez replies “shoot me - you ain’t got no warrant.”

The sound of glass breaking is later heard followed by two volleys of gunshots.

McManus took no questions, citing ongoing investigations into the shooting by the police department’s Internal Affairs and Civil Rights divisions and the Bexar County district attorney’s Civil Rights Division.

Other officers were also at the scene, but none are expected to be charged although all will be investigated for their actions, McManus said.

“This incident will continue to be thoroughly investigated, as are all officer involved shootings,” McManus said while expressing condolences to Perez’s family.

To read more CLICK HERE

DOJ: Racism, excessive force and unconstitutional practices by Minneapolis police

The Justice Department said on that the Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people, used deadly force without justification and trampled the First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists — damning findings that grew out of a multiyear investigation and may lead to a court-enforced overhaul, reported The New York Times.

The federal review was touched off by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a Minneapolis officer in 2020, a crime that led to protests and unrest across the country. But the Justice Department’s scathing 89-page report looked well beyond that killing, describing a police force impervious to accountability whose officers beat, shot and detained people unjustly and patrolled without the trust of residents.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, speaking at a news conference in Minneapolis, said Mr. Floyd’s “death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and around the world,” and that “the patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible.”

The murder of Mr. Floyd, who was captured on video saying “I can’t breathe” while he was pinned to the ground by Officer Derek Chauvin, focused international attention on the Minneapolis Police Department. But to many people in the city, where protesters had complained for years about police excesses, Mr. Floyd’s death, as horrifying as it was, was not entirely surprising. The Justice Department investigators described “numerous incidents in which officers responded to a person’s statement that they could not breathe with a version of, ‘You can breathe; you’re talking right now.’”

The Justice Department’s report was almost uniformly critical, painting a disturbing portrait of a dysfunctional law enforcement agency where illegal conduct was common, racism was pervasive and misconduct was tolerated.

In many cases, investigators found, officers fired weapons without assessing the threat they faced; used neck restraints even in interactions that did not lead to an arrest; and used their Tasers, sometimes without warning, on pedestrians and drivers who had committed minor offenses or no offense at all.

The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible. We found that M.P.D. and the City of Minneapolis engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force, unlawfully discriminating against Black and Native American people in enforcement activities, violating the rights of people engaged in protected speech and discriminating against people with behavioral disabilities and responding to them — when responding to them in crisis. We found that the Minneapolis Police Department routinely uses excessive force, often when no force is necessary, including unjust, deadly force and unreasonable use of Tasers. M.P.D. officers discharged firearms at people without assessing whether the person presents any threat, let alone a threat that would justify deadly force. We also found that M.P.D. officers routinely disregard the safety of people in their custody. Our review found numerous incidents in which M.P.D. officers responded to a person’s statement that they could not breathe with a version of “You can breathe. You’re talking right now.” Based on our review of the data, M.P.D. officers stop, search and then use force against people who are Black and Native American at disproportionate rates. We found several incidents in which M.P.D. officers were not held accountable for racist conduct until there was a public outcry.

 “This is not a secret,” said Bridgette Stewart, a lifelong Minnesotan who is Black and who has regularly spent time at the site of Mr. Floyd’s murder. “This is something that’s been going on in Minnesota for many, many, many, many years — longer than I’ve been alive.”

Minneapolis officials appeared at the news conference alongside the attorney general on Friday, and promised to negotiate with the Justice Department to reach an overhaul agreement, known as a consent decree, that would be monitored in federal court and would force specific changes to the Police Department. Similar consent decrees have followed federal investigations of police misconduct in other American cities, including Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans.

To read more CLICK HERE

Already this year 13,959 people have died from gun violence in the U.S.

Shootings have continuously made headlines in just the first few months of the year.

As of May 1, at least 13,959 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of roughly 115 deaths each day, reported ABC News.

Of those who died, 491 were teens and 85 were children.

Deaths by suicide have made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year. There's been an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.

The majority of these deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.

The grim tally of gun violence deaths includes 460 people killed in officer-involved shootings.

There have also been 494 "unintentional" shootings, the Gun Violence Archive shows.

There have been 184 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which is defined by the Gun Violence Archive as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed. These mass shootings have led to 248 deaths and 744 injuries.

There have been at least 13 K-12 school shootings so far this year, including a recent incident in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27 when three children and three staff members were shot and killed at the Covenant School, a Christian school for students in preschool through sixth grade.

In Michigan, three students were killed and five others were injured when a gunman opened fire at two locations on Michigan State University's main campus in East Lansing on Feb. 13, police said.

California saw three mass shootings in a matter of days in January, with one shooting leaving at least 11 people killed and 10 others injured after a gunman opened fire at a dance studio near a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, California.

The U.S. has surpassed 39,000 deaths from gun violence per year since 2014, according to data from Gun Violence Archive. Still, gun deaths are down from 2016, 2017 and 2018, when the total number of deaths each year surpassed 50,000. There were 44,310 such deaths in 2022.

Last June President Joe Biden signed into law a gun safety package passed by Congress. It was the first gun reform bill from Congress in decades.

But advocates for gun reform continue to push for tougher measures. Florida lawmakers Rep. Jared Moskowitz and Rep. Maxwell Frost spoke with "GMA3" this month to mark the fifth anniversary of the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and called on Congress to do more to curb gun violence.

"Five years later, we feel like we've made some progress and then we were reminded that nothing has changed," Moskowitz said.

To read more CLICK HERE

America's over-confident obsession with guns for 'self-protection'

 Christine Emba writing for the Washington Post:

At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear.

Here were weekend shoppers intently inspecting tools of death: moms testing the heft of handguns and fathers stocking up on ammo. When I asked attendees and sellers what gun ownership meant to them, most replied with the same word: “protection.”previous week had brought three highly publicized shootings. Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager in Kansas City, Mo., was allegedly shot by an 84-year-old White man after he rang the wrong doorbell to pick up his younger siblings; a 65-year-old man in Upstate New York allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman who accidentally pulled into his driveway; and two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after trying to get into the wrong car after a practice.

For all the talk of protection, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Yet over and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe.

Safe from what? Most couldn’t answer; they simply had a feeling that the world had become a more dangerous place. How would they use their guns in a crisis? Their confidence in their own abilities seemed inflated.

This manifested in the constant invocation of the word “tactical” — a gun-industry buzzword used to suggest that buyers of weapons, body armor and shooting courses will be able to engage with enemies like trained soldiers. In other words, a fantasy.

Republican leaders, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, have resisted calls for increased gun regulation after shooting deaths, arguing that the root problem is mental illness. But the paranoia that fuels gun-buying has come to seem like a mental health issue in its own right.

“It’s crazy out there,” a woman named Dinah told me, an unloaded rifle slung over one shoulder. “People don’t care anymore, and criminals go for the low-hanging fruit. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I can’t protect myself.”

A record-high 56 percent of Americans believe that crime has increased in their area, even if reality is more complicated. Republicans in particular have grown sharply more concerned. Many Americans no longer assume that a stranger might be well-meaning, innocent or harmless; rather, the world is seen as an increasingly dangerous place. Incessant media coverage of violent events has encouraged this thinking, the gun-show attendees told me. And poorly understood “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws perpetuate and protect a vigilante mind-set.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of gun ownership for “protection” is the sharp-edged individualism it implies: an every-man-for-himself mind-set. Institutions can’t be trusted, police will be unresponsive, and the government might one day turn on you. Your only obligations are to yourself and your family.

Individual fear becomes a greater priority than collective safety. Increasing the number of guns in the system will almost certainly spell death for others, but at least your gun will keep you safe.

 “You can’t predict who is going to shoot someone,” one ammunition salesman told me. “It’s just the nature of the evil world we live in. So I’ve got to be prepared.”

Today there are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the United States, according to an estimate by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey — in other words, 120 guns for every 100 Americans. That’s the highest rate of any country in the world, and more than double that of the next country on the list.

The gun owners I spoke to were open to some violence-prevention measures. They suggested mandatory training courses, raising age limits for gun-buying or cracking down on dealers who sell to people not legally allowed to buy guns.

But no one was willing to give up their own weapons. They would rather “open the floodgates,” as one shooting instructor put it. If everyone has a gun, the theory goes, everyone will be more careful. If the side effect is a private arms race in a country already flooded with guns, so be it.

Over and over again, I heard the NRA-approved phrase: “An armed society is a polite society.” But guns might be leading us to give up on the concept of society altogether.

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One in 20 gun homicides in the U.S. are committed by police

In the US, an estimated one in 20 gun homicides are committed by police, as law enforcement killings have failed to decrease despite years of nationwide protests, reports The Guardian.

Law enforcement officers killed at least 1,192 people in 2022, the highest number recorded in a decade, according to Mapping Police Violence, a prominent non-profit database of police killings. More than 1,100 people were killed by the police in both 2020 and 2021. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings.

There were more than 25,000 total homicides in the US in 2020 and 26,000 in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). National data for 2022 is not yet available.

Police shooting deaths represented 5% of all gun homicides in 2020 and 2021, and total police killings represented nearly 5% of all homicides, according to the best available public data.

Because only a small number of deadly incidents each year receive wide media attention, many Americans may not realize that “a meaningful fraction of homicides in the US are police killings”, said Justin Feldman, a researcher at the Center for Policing Equity.

The number of US homicide victims who die in mass shootings each year, for instance, is smaller than the number killed by police. While definitions of “mass shooting” vary, the estimated number of people killed in these incidents have ranged from a few dozen to 700 people a year in recent years.

“There is a lot of fear, with mass shootings and gun violence in general, that some stranger will show up wherever you are and kill you,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence. “But police contribute a large part to those numbers.”

The circumstances for many murders are listed as unknown in the FBI’s incomplete national crime statistics database, but in 2020 nearly 4,000 people were listed as being killed by a friend or an acquaintance, and about 1,800 were known to be killed by a stranger.

Some police departments have much higher rates of police killings than others. In Vallejo, California, which is known for police violence, the police department was responsible for 30% of the city’s homicides in 2012. Police killed six people that year; a single officer killed three people in three different incidents, and was later promoted.

More than 32,000 Americans have been killed by police since 1980, but official public health statistics have undercounted the number of killings for decades, according to a 2021 study from University of Washington researchers published in the Lancet, a prominent medical journal. Over the past four decades, US police have killed Black people at a rate 3.5 times higher than white people, and have also killed Hispanic and Indigenous people at higher rates, the study estimated.

The rate of fatalities from police violence rose even when the nation’s overall homicide rate sharply declined, with the rate of deaths from police violence rising 38% from the 1980s to the 2010s, the study found. 

The US has much higher rates of both police killings and overall homicides than other wealthy countries. In Europe, the combined number of police killings and state executions remains in the single digits each year in many countries, according to data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The US’s annual rate of police killings and state executions, with more than 1,000 deaths a year, is more comparable to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan, according to IHME data.

At least one international study has found the rate of police killings “strongly correlates” with overall homicide rates across multiple countries, but also noted that data on police violence is likely to be less reliable in countries where police kill more frequently.

A 2018 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health found that “police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018”, or about one in 12. Frank Edwards, a Rutgers University sociologist and the lead author of that study, said it was not surprising that the current percentage of police homicides would be somewhat lower than 8% when factoring in the killings of women and well as men, and as the national total number of homicides had also increased sharply since 2020.

Public databases from news outlets and non-profits still offer more complete and reliable data on police killings than the US government, more than seven years after the nation’s FBI director called it “embarrassing and ridiculous” that newspapers produced a more accurate national count of US police shootings than the Department of Justice. Mapping Police Violence, for instance, tracks police killings using a combination of state law enforcement data and incident data drawn from media reports and public records requests.

It’s not only national crime data that’s flawed when it comes to homicides by police. For decades, more than half of police killings have been mislabeled as generic homicides or suicides in the CDC’s official death statistics database, said Eve Wool and Mohsen Naghavi, two of the authors of the Lancet paper on police killings.

The undercounting of police killings in public health data is a result of coding failures by coroners, medical examiners and other public health officials, many of whom “work for or are embedded within police departments”, the researchers found.

Because of the lack of official statistics, Feldman and Edwards said, comparing the count of police killings in non-profit databases like Mapping Police Violence with the CDC’s total homicide numbers is the most accurate way to estimate the percentage of homicides committed by police.

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Lawfare: 'American policing is violent, humiliating, and dehumanizing'

American policing is violent, humiliating, and dehumanizing, reports Lawfare. It has led to thousands of avoidable deaths. Since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, police killings have only continued, at a rate of over 1,000 people per year. Black people are much more likely to be the victims of these governmental extrajudicial killings. Rather than treat Black and Brown Americans as members of the public they are supposed to serve, the culture and practices of policing treat them as a less-than-human enemy.

Police are occupying forces in many urban Black and Brown communities. People of color too poor to live in a middle class or wealthy neighborhood because of decades of segregation, disinvestment, redlining, and mass incarceration are subjected to heavy and disproportionate surveillance and violence by police. With police helicopters overhead, more police precincts per capita, and plainclothes and uniformed police on patrol in these communities, this occupation sends a message to the public and to police themselves that the people being policed are dangerous. Notably, these militaristic police tactics have not been shown to reduce violent crime. 

But police are not in these neighborhoods to keep the peace or to respond to calls for service. If it wasn’t enough to subject people to their constant presence and scrutiny, law enforcement officers stop and search people in these communities on a regular basis. The impact is enormous. Police keep thousands of Americans from going about their daily routines, followed by manual invasions of their bodies, penetrations of their waistbands and pockets, and lifts of their garments often in public. In New York City, innocent people going about their everyday lives have been stopped by police over 5 million times since 2002. In 2011, over 685,000 New Yorkers were stopped in a single year. Police in California stopped 1.8 million people in just a six-month period. In 2018, the Metropolitan Police Department, one of many Washington, D.C., police departments, stopped more than 200,000 people in a city of just over 700,000. Police in all three places were most likely to stop or use violence against Black people, the overwhelming number of whom were innocent of any crime. While perhaps these involuntary interactions between police and civilians might seem utilitarian, safe, and brief in the abstract, in practice these experiences can be violent, terrifying, and traumatic. While pointless from a public safety standpoint, these interactions send a message to police officers that Black and Brown people can be harassed and degraded with impunity. 

Police across the country are authorized to stop people for pretextual reasons. As long as law enforcement officers have a legal justification to make a stop, they can use a hunch, caprice, or any other motivation to conduct this contact with a fellow citizen. Police can even stop someone because that person would rather decline the interaction. The ability of the police to stop anyone for whatever reason they want makes many people of color perceive police officers less as public servants and more as abusive stalkers.

It is no secret that during these stops and other interactions, police officers sometimes speak to citizens in unprofessional, disrespectful, and offensive ways. The Department of Justice reports in Chicago, Ferguson, and Baltimore made plain that police commonly used offensive language and even racial slurs in those cities when describing or addressing people of color. My own research documented well over a hundred instances of explicit racial bias by law enforcement officers on social media, text messages, and emails. The Plainview Project proved that thousands of police officers posted racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments on a single social media platform. Police culture and practice tolerates officers disparaging the people paying their salaries. No other profession would allow its staff to treat its customers in the way the police treat the residents of many communities. 

Heavy militaristic police presence, disparaging language, frequent stops and searches based on pretexts, and disparaging language are all evidence that police view Black and Brown people with suspicion and fear. These groups of people are not served by police—they are subjugated by them. 

Some laws and policies incentivize the police to engage in these terrifying interactions. For example, some police departments have quotas for arrests, and so contacts with civilians like stop and frisks help officers make their quotas. There are other incentives to stop motorists beyond quotas. Federal funds subsidize highway traffic stops. If police departments do not write tickets or make arrests on highways, then their departments risk losing those monies.

Civil asset forfeiture, and other revenue-generating activity, is another law enforcement policy that drives dangerous interactions between police and American citizens. Stops of people give police an opportunity to seize their property without ever charging anyone with a crime or traffic infraction. In fact, in some years police have taken more from civilians than actual burglars. Memphis’s Scorpion unit—the unit at the center of the Tyre Nichols murder—was lauded recently by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland for seizing “$103,000 in cash and 270 vehicles” just between October 2021 and January 2022. Civil asset forfeiture encourages officers to see citizens as a source of revenue for their department and incentivizes police officers to come into contact with individuals in case there are items they can seize from them. And in some jurisdictions, the revenue from tickets for traffic violations further motivates police to come into contact with Americans who are simply living their lives. For example, the Department of Justice reported that the fines and fees collected in relation to traffic enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed by police, subsidized much of the city government there.

But it’s not just police policies and practices—the culture of police officer hiring also puts Americans in danger. Police officers are overwhelmingly male and young, and current hiring only perpetuates these demographics. While America is diverse in terms of gender, age, and race, its police departments are not. This is concerning—the presence of even a single woman police officer on a scene reduces the chance for violence. Women are less likely to use force and more likely to deescalate an encounter. But women make up less than 13 percent of American police departments’ staff. In addition to gender, age plays a role in the violence inflicted on civilians. Young people in their teens and twenties are often more violent, impulsive, and susceptible to peer pressure, yet police departments hire people as young as 18–21, making those officers a more dangerous cohort. The police officers charged with killing Nichols are all men between the ages of 24 and 32. 

The aftermath of the homicide of Nichols also shows that police officers will fabricate their version of events in order to justify their actions or avoid any penalties. The initial police report about Nichols’s interaction with police, written while he was still alive, is riddled with inaccuracies. Unfortunately, there are countless examples of officers lying, and they usually face no consequences for their mendacity. For example, the report about the botched raid that caused Breonna Taylor’s death falsely asserted that she had no injuries. When Buffalo police pushed an elderly man at a protest in 2020, the first police report falsely claimed that he tripped—until video showed he was violently pushed. The police report on the George Floyd case described his death as a medical event and omitted any mention of the officer pressing his knee down on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. Police misrepresentations are not limited to their police reports. Testifying falsely is so common for police that there is even a term for it: “testilying.” Despite a troubling number of instances of police being exposed for lying, they continue to do it because they have little fear that they will be caught. In fact, in New York City, some officers who lied received promotions. 

One well-documented aspect of police culture that protects officers’ misrepresentations, misbehavior, and violence is known as the “blue wall of silence.” This means they do not typically report their fellow officers when they transgress. Even when citizens file complaints and civilian review boards recommend punishment for officers, police departments often lessen the severity of the discipline or ignore it altogether. For example, one study found that only 3 percent of complaints against Chicago police officers resulted in any discipline. 

On the rare occasion that police are disciplined, police culture and practice is for problem officers to stay on the force in positions where they interact with civilians. Four of the five officers accused of killing Nichols had previous complaints against them. The officer who killed George Floyd had 18 complaints against him and received discipline for two. The New York Police Department officer who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death had 17 misconduct complaints at the time of Garner’s murder. The officer who shot Walter Scott in the back on videotape had previously been in trouble with his department for using his stun gun on an unarmed person. And the officer who was convicted of killing Laquan McDonald had 29 complaints against him, many for excessive force. The officers responsible for Breonna Taylor’s killing had prior complaints against them as well. Police management and supervision practices fail to hold police accountable and instead embolden them and place them back in a position to harm.

Police culture and practices too often lead the police to harm the people they are supposed to be serving. Police violence is a leading cause of death of young Black men. While many of these deaths, like the tragic death of Tyre Nichols, make headlines, many other injuries are caused by police. For every death caused by police, at least 50 individuals are sent to hospitals due to police brutality. There are many more bruises, bumps, scrapes, and psychological traumas that are never documented. 

Nichols’s killing was tragic and avoidable. While police officers have been arrested for his killing, their prosecution will not solve the much broader problem within police policies, practices, and culture that contributed to Nichols’s death. Fundamental and drastic changes to policing—and the criminal legal system more broadly—are needed in order to stop government-funded violence against the people the government is supposed to protect.

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Diversity is not a panacea to race based police violence

As numerous researchers told the Los Angeles Time's Jaweed Kaleem, diversity isn’t a panacea to police violence, wrote Erika D. Smith of the Times.

“Studies indicate that Black officers are just as brutal and at times even more brutal against Black bodies as their white counterparts,” said Duane Loynes Sr., an assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., who studies the relationship between Black communities and police. “If a system is problematic, it doesn’t matter who you plug into it. You will get the same result.”

Of course, none of this is exactly news to Black people, much less to Lora King, Rodney King's daughter. King was brutalized by police on video on 1991.

 “I know my dad’s situation,” she said of King, who died in 2012. “And [some of] the bystanders were African American cops who did nothing.”

This is why, when activists with Black Lives Matter takes to the streets to demand justice for an act of police brutality, the race of the officers involved is almost never mentioned — it’s so irrelevant.

And yet, almost 32 years after the Rodney King beating, many still seem confused and shocked that Nichols was beaten by five Black cops in a city where more than half the police force is Black and most residents are too.

Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith were all members of the Memphis Police Department’s aggressive violent-crime unit, “SCORPION.” The unit has since been disbanded. And the officers have been fired, arrested, charged and released on bail.

Their deadly encounter with Nichols started as so many do — with a traffic stop.

“You gonna get your ass blown the f— out,” one officer yells at Nichols, who is seated in his car. Then, with guns pointed at him, an officer drags him from the driver’s seat.

“I didn’t do anything,” Nichols says. “All right, I’m on the ground.”

A few minutes later, an officer tells Nichols: “Watch out, I’m gonna baton the f— out of you!” Then another officer punches him in the face. Others hold him up as more blows are delivered.

“All right, all right,” Nichols says, moaning and trying desperately to comply with their orders.

Throughout the beating, he screams for his mother, who was at home only a short distance away. Near the end of the recording, the officers can be heard laughing and joking as Nichols, propped up against a car, slumps over.

 “Hey, sit up, bro,” one officer tells Nichols, who, by this point, was lying on the ground in pain. “Sit up, man.”

I wouldn’t advise anyone to watch the video, even the snippets, but if you do, you’ll see what looks more like someone getting jumped in an alley outside of a dive bar than police officers trying to arrest someone.

That all five were comfortable carrying out such senseless savagery while not only wearing body cameras but doing it under a pole-mounted police surveillance camera, is indicative of a toxic culture of policing. A “groupthink,” as Chief Davis called it, that is bigger than “bad apples.”

Sure, it’s extremely disappointing that not one of them looked at Nichols and saw a reflection of their own Blackness — and a recognition of the brutality that so many Black people have endured over the decades by people with a badge and a gun.

“They have brought shame to their own families,” Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, told CNN on Friday. “They brought shame to the Black community.”

They also betrayed the civil rights activists who’ve been fighting to protect Black lives for more decades than I’ve been alive.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who also has drawn comparisons between Nichols and King, acknowledged “that these officers are Black makes it more egregious to those of us in the civil rights movement.” But “these officers should not be allowed to hide their deeds behind their Blackness. We are against all police brutality — not just white police brutality.”

And police brutality, at its core, is about systemic racism, not the racism of individual officers. It’s about enforcing a system of power that is built on white supremacy and carried out by overpolicing low-income communities of color, like an occupying force.

Anyone, even Black cops, can be a tool of that system because anyone can be a tool of white supremacy.

So, no, diversifying police departments won’t help. What will help are new laws that fundamentally change how police departments operate, whether it’s requiring more active monitoring of officers’ mental health or somehow changing their role in carrying out traffic stops. We have to be more intentional about explicitly forbidding and punishing behavior that needs to stop.

“Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working,” Lora King told me. “It’s not working because we’re still in the same place going into infinity sign. So the whole everything needs to be reconstructed.”

Nichols, who died days after his beating, swollen and bloodied on a ventilator in a Memphis hospital, had lived in Sacramento until just a few years ago. He leaves behind a 4-year-old son.

Like the daughter of Rodney King, his son will one day have to make sense of a system of policing and of power that a majority of Americans refuse to meaningfully change because they benefit from it — even as it continues to destroy Black lives, one way or another.

“It’s sad we even have to compare this. It’s sad that it’s even happening,” King said, trying to come up with the words. “It doesn’t make sense. I can never make sense of it. It’s sickening.”

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